Happy Endings
by riffmca
Summary: Sometimes there has to be one.
1. Chapter One

The rain hammered down, flattening his hair. Cordelia had made jokes about his hair. Cordelia was dead, like Doyle and Fred and Wesley. Gunn would soon join them – even at its best, human stamina could only hold out for minutes in a frenzied fight like this one. Already Gunn lay semiconscious as the others tried to protect him.

Angel parried an axe and sliced through its owner's chest, smelling, hearing, and seeing the next threat as it clumsily mounted a pile of bodies that had begun to choke the alley. The Senior Partners' army pressed forward and the dragon circled overhead, but the impetus of their charge was gone. It occurred to Angel that by sheer luck he'd chosen the best possible place for this confrontation. But no matter how much luck he had and no matter how well he and his comrades fought, there was no hope of victory; he could only postpone the conclusion. As soon as his strength failed, he would be destroyed.

He was aware of Spike springing upright after being thrown against a wall, was aware of Illyria adding to the heap of corpses with brutal punches and kicks. These two would be the ones standing by him at the end. Not his friends; his friends were gone. Memories of the offices of Angel Investigations and the Hyperion Hotel rose within him. Of smiles, laughter, and gentle teasing. Of familiar greetings, morning doughnuts, and ridiculous arguments. How trivial, how wonderful and beautiful it had been. There was sadness and betrayal, too, but that now seemed irrelevant. He thought only of the love and the family he had known here. It was an unkind fate for it all to end in death and this terrible, final alleyway, but it seemed inevitable. All that remained was regret and the hopeless righteous fight. Connor, Buffy, and Nina were safe. The Circle of the Black Thorn had been wiped out. It would have to be enough.

As he thought that, Illyria's voice cut through the battle's din, a shard of ice. "I will not allow this."

A small hand grasped his collar, and he was lifted off the ground, seeing the floor and sky change places. He landed heavily on one shoulder and sat up cursing and dazed. Illyria must have thrown him over the chain-link fence and far down the alley. Spike, he saw, had also been flung out of the battle. What the hell was she up to?

Picking up his sword he ran toward the fence, meaning to launch himself over and into the fray, but Illyria now leapt it easily, Gunn in her arms. She dropped the unconscious man without a glance and rammed a fist into Angel's jaw faster than he would have thought possible. Again, he found himself on the ground.

Spike made a move against her and was kicked in the ribs. He dropped, sprawling, near to Angel. They glanced at one another. Spike's face showed the same emotion Angel was feeling. Illyria stood over them, maddeningly imperious. Beyond her and the fence the army advanced cautiously. She had done violence – the alley was a place of carnage.

Angel attempted to stand. "Illyria," he hissed.

"I will not indulge you with discussion and debate, vampire," she said. "I am ending this."

Spike was on his feet now, bent double and clutching his chest. "Yeah? And what do you plan on doing?"

Illyria turned to face the fence and gripped a metal post in each hand. "I am taking vengeance." She began to chant. "Klyv mat chyvma, klvma chyt." Her hands tightened, fingers sinking into the metal as if it were wet clay. The rain stopped. The demons' battle cries hushed. The world seemed to pause in expectation.

At first there was just quiet. Then tendrils of blue light began to form in the sky somewhere beyond the alley, spinning and coalescing. They spiralled inward, merging to generate a portal vortex. Angel looked at it aghast. It was huge and getting bigger, a widening cataract in the Los Angeles sky. The circling ring of electric blue looked uncomfortably like one of Illyria's eyes gazing wrathfully down from the heavens.

As he watched, Angel saw the rear sections of the army begin to panic, saw weapons, helmets, and finally bodies leave the ground to be sucked inexorably into the portal. The army surged forward to escape, but crushed itself in the bottleneck of the alley. Soon the demons were fighting among themselves. Meanwhile, the portal began to move closer, dragging up those in its path. A breeze started and quickly grew into a wind. Newspapers and other bits of detritus around Angel floated into the air and drifted lazily in the direction of the blue storm.

"Oh bugger," Spike said softly.

Angel turned to look and noticed Spike's duster flapping in the rising gale. Then he glanced upward. "Illyria, make it stop," he said.

Still gripping the fence posts, she shook with effort. There was no sign she intended to close the portal any time soon.

Angel stood up. "Illyria!"

She paused in her chanting long enough to say, "Leave."

He didn't argue. "Come on," he said to Spike. They each took hold of one of Gunn's arms and ran from the approaching portal, the wind's mounting ferocity obliterating the sounds of their footfalls. When they came to a manhole, Angel wrenched off the cover. "In!" he shouted. Spike dropped into the service shaft and Angel bundled Gunn unceremoniously after him before scrambling down the ladder. He stopped to draw the cover across the opening (for all the good that would do), and then jumped from the steps and up to his ankles in the rain-swollen sewer.

Spike was already moving along the pipe, dragging Gunn with him. Angel ploughed through the floodwater to catch them, and then he and Spike wordlessly lifted Gunn and ran as fast as they were able. Behind him, Angel could hear the monstrous wheezing of air being sucked from the sewers though drains and other accesses. He was able to tell that it was loudest at the maintenance shaft they'd just entered. There, the wheezing had become an increasingly hysterical whistle. Angel marked time by the rhythmic splashes of their feet. If they could reach the junction fifty feet or so ahead they would at least have some purchase, something to hang on to.

With a gloomy thud that must have been the cover being ripped from the manhole, their brief moment of shelter was over. An explosion of spray hit Angel as the water flew out of the pipe. Spike lost his footing, and Gunn's prone form slithered from his grasp. Angel caught the man before he was pulled away. They struggled on to the junction. Angel had hoped they'd be far enough from the portal by now, but the hurricane-like winds, magnified in the confined space of the sewers, were growing too powerful. He used all his strength in the attempt to keep moving forward; with Gunn's weight it was all he could do to stop being dragged back.

"Here, grab a hold!" Spike had made it to the junction and was reaching back with one hand while the other wrapped around the right angle in the pipe. Desperately, Angel reached. For a few seconds his fingers danced in the air, and then Spike caught his hand.

They stayed like that for a short while – Spike held onto the junction with one hand and Angel with the other; Angel kept an arm around Gunn's waist. Soon Spike was shouting with the effort of holding all three of them against the force of the portal, and Angel felt the other vampire's grip begin to weaken. But Spike didn't let him go. It was the hand holding onto the pipe that gave way first.

All three of them shot down the sewer as if it were a waterslide in a nightmare, skidding to a halt as the winds abruptly ended. They were almost beneath the service shaft. Angel looked up at the circle of night sky. It seemed calm and free of dragons.

- - -

The first things he noticed as he climbed back out into the alley were the sounds of the city – traffic and the occasional shout; ordinary Los Angeles sounds. He could hear sirens and trouble in various places, but none of it had anything to do with the army of demons or the mystical portal in the sky, as far as he could tell. Had no one noticed what had just happened?

There was little evidence to show anything had taken place. The alley was unusually clean. There were scratch marks running up the walls. The fence was twisted and wrecked, but that was all he could see. The most remarkable thing was a blue woman hanging onto the broken fence and trembling.

"It's really true, then," Spike said. Angel watched him lift Gunn gently out of the sewer and take a few steps toward Illyria, looking at her as if for the first time. "Hell hath no fury."

Maybe. But how? Moving to her side, Angel passed his hand in front of her eyes several times with no response. "Can you hear me, Illyria? What did you do?" For a moment he thought she wouldn't answer; then she began to speak in a tired and defeated voice.

"I opened an inter-dimensional gateway."

"Bit of an understatement." Spike laughed faintly. "I thought your powers were gone, Blue."

She finally opened her fists and turned to look at them both. "My grace is diminished to a feeble shadow, yes."

"So where did the mother of all portals come from?" Angel said.

Illyria began spitting words. "I worked magic, a pitifully simple ritual known to the shell."

Spike glanced at Angel and then back at her. "Wait a minute. You're saying Fred knew how to do that?"

"I was able to enhance it. I still have some power."

Palms out and stepping back, Spike said, "No arguments here, love." He fell silent.

"Those words you used," Angel muttered.

She cocked her head. "They are not words. They are consonant representations of a mathematical transfiguration formula."

That sounded familiar; Fred had said that to him once. But before Angel could think about it she was speaking again.

"Wesley taught it to her." Illyria glanced down. "She intended to use it to avenge herself against the one called Seidel. Charles Gunn broke his neck first." She raised her eyes. "The memory surfaced."

There was no time to digest all that. Perhaps it really wasn't his business, anyway. He looked over his shoulder for a moment. "Spike," he said, "go check on Gunn. We have to get him to a hospital." He focused his attention back on Illyria. "Where's the army? Where's the dragon?"

"The place where the shell sent Seidel."

"And that is?"

Her eyes seemed to darken. "Somewhere painful."

Angel's gaze was locked with hers when Spike appeared at his side. "There's a pulse and he's breathing, but he's going fast."

"He will not last much longer," Illyria said.

"That's obvious. Can you do anything about it?"

"No." She tore what was left of the fence from the walls of the alley and threw it overhead as she had thrown the two vampires only minutes before. "Wesley is gone. Nothing is of any consequence." She began to depart, then halted and turned. "He was no match for the sorcerer," she said to Angel. "You sent him to his death. You wasted a great warrior. I should take vengeance on you also."

He couldn't even raise his voice. "Why don't you?"

She span on her heel and, walking with dignity, left him there.

- - -

Gunn was dying. They had started to move him, hoping that there might be a chance to get him some medical attention, but before they'd left the alley he began to cough up blood. Angel lowered him to a sitting position and propped him against a wall, trying to make him comfortable. The young man's eyes opened for a moment, unfocused and delirious.

"I'll take … I'll take the twenty … on the left … Look at English …" He smiled, lost in memory, Angel supposed. Yet another death was coming, another soldier down.

"You know what that's about?" Spike asked quietly.

"It was a big fight we were in once, Gunn, Wes, and me. We were totally outnumbered." He couldn't help raising a sad smile himself, and Spike answered it.

"You came through it, right?"

Angel felt his smile widen ever so slightly. "We didn't win, exactly, but yeah. We came through it." He placed a hand on Gunn's shoulder. "Didn't we, big guy?" Gunn was unconscious again.

"We didn't do too badly tonight ourselves," Spike said.

"Yeah, well don't kid yourself. This is a temporary reprieve. The Senior Partners won't rest until we're dust." Angel sighed. "Time's almost up for Gunn right now."

A sudden blast of light and sound made him look to his left. An ambulance slid to a stop on the street outside the alley. The rear doors opened and a gang of paramedics emerged, carrying a stretcher. They ran to Gunn's side. "We'll take it from here, Mr Angel," one of them said. Angel watched, stunned, as Gunn was whisked away in a flurry of activity and medical instruments. The ambulance sped off, siren blaring. As the sound receded, he heard a soft clicking on the pavement. It grew louder, approaching them. A woman's heels.

"Lilah," he said as she rounded the corner.

"Angel!" She grinned, walking to within a few feet of him. "And Spike. Hi." She held out a hand to the other vampire. Spike didn't even look at it.

"Don't believe I've had the pleasure," he said.

"Spike, this is Lilah, hell-bitch extraordinaire." In an instant, Angel gripped her upper arm. "What are you doing here? Did they figure they'd have to send a nastier dragon?"

Her smile didn't falter. "And after I just saved your friend's life." She sighed theatrically. "I have a message from the Senior Partners."

"Really? Let me guess – the quarterly review will have some constructive criticism on the way I've been handling things. Or is it worse than that? Am I on my first written warning?"

She breathed a laugh in that genuine and yet utterly humourless way of hers. "The Senior Partners are very pleased."

That fazed him for a moment, but he quickly gathered himself. He wouldn't give her the pleasure of knowing she'd had an effect on him. "What, they're gloating 'cause they lost? The Circle of the Black Thorn has been smashed; I doubt the Senior Partners are celebrating."

The grin notched upward. "Angel, the Circle is eternal. You might think you've created a setback, but the truth is that it's normal for these little power-struggles to go on among the Black Thorn from time to time. It keeps things fresh."

"Little power-struggles? Don't you get it, Lilah? They're all dead. You'll have to start from scratch."

"But they aren't all dead. One survived."

Damn. Who was it? Sebassis was gone, that was definite. So that left Izzy, the Senator, the Fell, Vail… Lilah looked at him pityingly.

"You really are dumb, aren't you? I don't know what they see in you." Taking his face in her hand she shouted, "Hello? One survived?"

"I think she means you," Spike said.

His eyes widening, Angel's hand moved to where they'd burnt the Black Thorn's mark into him. Oh, no.

"Normally a challenger puts together his own army for the final test," Lilah was saying. "The one Sebassis assembled is legend. But you had to be unconventional, using the blue girl. That's why they wanted you, I suppose. You think outside the box."

"Wanted me?" Angel frowned.

"To lead the Circle."

No. This couldn't be. "I'm not buying it, Lilah," he said with a lot more assurance than he felt.

"So modest. Apart from the obvious point that you've won the right to lead, who better to continue the Circle's good work of man's inhumanity to man than the guy responsible for ending universal peace and love?"

Spike's eyebrows went up. "Strange. I never noticed that."

"This isn't a job offer," Lilah went on. "The fact is, Angel, you're already head of the Circle."

It was impossible. Wes had died for this? _You mean, you sent Wes to his death for this,_ a part of his mind said. Leader of the Black Thorn. Well, it wasn't going to happen. They thought he was their toy to play with. They were wrong. "Fine. I'll dust myself. Problem solved."

"I'll do it for you," Spike said, "you know, if you can't face staking yourself. It's nothing to be ashamed of." Angel glanced briefly in his direction to give him a withering look.

Lilah nodded. "You could do that, sure, but then we'd have to fill the position with some truly evil creature. There are so many to choose from. And all that selecting and short-listing and interviewing is a real chore. Think about it, Angel. This isn't like being a CEO for Wolfram & Hart; that would just be your-" she coughed "-day job. As leader of the Black Thorn you're in control of the power. You really could stop evil."

"I'm not falling for that again."

"No? So you'd rather we set up a new Circle with the wickedest beings in this dimension? With you gone they'd have a ball."

No choice, as usual. What had happened to free will? When had that left the universe? Okay, he'd have to work this somehow. After a few seconds thought, he said, "Who would be in the Circle? Would I get to choose?"

Spike snorted. "Oh, you aren't seriously thinking of-"

"Quit it, Spike. Do I choose?"

Lilah smirked. She was so smug he felt like knocking her head back off her shoulders. "The new Circle is usually made from the challenger's trusted lieutenants. So, Gunn would be one." She smiled at Spike.

"What?" he said. Then his lip curled in outrage. "_I'm_ not his bloody lieutenant!"

- - -

Five minutes later, Angel sat with Spike in the ludicrously spacious back of a Wolfram & Hart limousine. Lilah had assured him offhand that the Los Angeles offices were fully restored. Having seen the company's HQ in Rome, Angel guessed that they used a magical template of some kind in lieu of contractors. Very cost-effective.

"Things didn't go quite to plan, then," Spike said.

"Not really, no."

"At least we're still here to fight the good fight. Champions, helping the helpless, all that."

"Yeah. Great." Angel kicked an upholstered door, denting it. He had set out tonight to destroy the Circle of the Black Thorn. Okay, it would have only been a temporary inconvenience for the Senior Partners. Their apocalypse would continue, their evil would continue, and to them the end of the Circle would be no more than a momentary blip. But it would have shown that he still had an option, that he could go against whatever schemes they'd laid down for him. Now, it appeared, he'd played into their hands after all. It was as if some alien force guided his thoughts and decisions. He'd been so sure it was the only choice left open to him that actually _was_ a choice. It had seemed like a way to make Fred's death mean something. He was beginning to wonder how he could have been so brainless. What had he really been trying to achieve?

Spike broke the silence. "Anyway, here we are."

"Here we are. Right."

"Any thoughts on what the man-eater said? Are we going to play at Black Thorns for a while?"

Angel laughed; a bitter laugh. Did they have any alternative? "I can't think about it now. I just want to get drunk and sleep."

Shifting out of his seat, Spike found the alcohol, as he always did. "There's a mini bar right here. A drop of bourbon to whet your whistle?" There was a wicked grin on his face. The son of a bitch was enjoying this.

"Just give me the bottle, Spike," Angel said, snatching it.

The night-time city drifted past the limo's windows. There was violence and misery, desperate people selling themselves, inflicting pain, or just hating one another with a casual scorn for everyone and everything. This was the apocalypse, and now Angel was its motivator and guardian. Could he make a difference, rebel against the path that had been placed before him? He really didn't think so – fate led to nowhere but shadows. Wasn't it about time he accepted that?

Too soon, they pulled up at the Wolfram & Hart building. Inside, it was as if nothing at all out of the ordinary had happened. Not only was there no sign of the fight he'd had with Hamilton, but the night staff that had been absent only an hour earlier were bustling to and fro. He nodded automatically at the occasional, "Good evening, Mr Angel." If any of them were surprised to see their CEO blood-soaked and taking gulps from a bottle of Jim Beam, they gave no indication. They were mostly vampires, anyway. With a sudden ache he remembered Fred laughing, calling them "kinda the graveyard shift."

He noticed that Spike's eyes were darting around. The other vampire, Angel knew, was looking for threats, sizing people up.

"It's weird," Spike said, "like nothing's changed."

"That's because it hasn't. It never will."

"Yeah." Spike wasn't listening. "Look, you don't think this is the bad place with the fires and the pitchforks, do you?"

Swallowing bourbon, Angel gave him a questioning look.

"What I mean is, are we dust and blowing around that alley somewhere? Because I'm feeling-" A horrible, barked laugh made both of them look up the stairs.

"Oh, this is hell. I can assure you of that."

Disbelieving, Angel gaped up at the figure, the one that observed them with flat eyes. "Wes?"

Wesley came toward them down the stairs, moving like a cat with some subtle but terrible form of insanity. "Angel, Spike. Have you had a pleasant evening?"

Angel didn't know how to react. A part of him was overjoyed to see his friend alive; another part was sickened by what he saw now. Never before had he encountered a human so bent under the burden of darkness. "Wes," he said gently, "Illyria told us you were dead."

Wesley stared at him. It was the stare of a damned soul. "Did she? That was very remiss of her, wasn't it?" He looked at his wrist as if for a watch. There wasn't one. He uttered that single, barked laugh again. "Actually, I may have been dead when she told you."

Something sank inside Angel. "What do you mean?"

"Vail killed me, Angel. Can you really be surprised at that?"

"I'm sorry." What else could he say?

Spike moved closer. "You don't look very dead. You don't smell it."

As soon as Wesley turned his eyes on him, Spike froze. Wes began to speak, gesticulating languidly. "Yes, well. Lilah told me I was needed here. That, apparently, is why I woke up naked and shivering in a conference room on the fourth floor. Perhaps a ritual similar to the one which brought Darla back was used."

"We should find out." Angel tried to think and let his mouth move while he did it. "Did you recognise anything about the room, the people who were there, the magical items they were using?"

"Yes, but I'm really not interested. It was some sort of resurrection rite, obviously."

"Resurrection," said Spike. "So when you said this is hell, you didn't mean literally."

That stare again. "You needn't worry, Spike. You're still undead, still in the dimension of the living, still here to enjoy the barrenness and sorrow of this mortal coil. Nevertheless, this is hell."

Surprisingly, Spike became almost tender. "Where were you … before?"

"Don't ever ask me that." Those eyes now looked into Angel's. "I hear congratulations are in order for the boss. Something in the way of a promotion?"

Wait a second. "Lilah told you? But we've only just seen her."

"The dead travel fast. She supervised the ritual that restored me to what we'll laughingly call life. Seemed rather put out that I wasn't delighted to see her. I'm quite important for your new project, it seems."

That was what Vail had said. The Circle (the _old_ Circle) had been very interested in Wesley. And now here he was, automatically a member as one of Angel's lieutenants. "Look, Wes, you've got to believe me. I didn't want this. I know it might look as though I planned it, but you have my word that's not true."

"Angel, I don't care." The haunted eyes shifted. "Ah, Illyria." Angel watched Wesley walk to the main doors where Illyria stood with "his" corpse in her arms.

"Here's an interesting situation," Wes said to her. "Dead Wesley, live Wesley. Confused?"

"Yes." She sounded upset.

"Good." Wesley smirked viciously and then pulled the watch off dead Wesley's wrist and put it on his own. "I don't think he has anymore use for this." Without another word he turned and climbed the stairs.


	2. Chapter Two

Wesley sat behind his desk, because that was what he did. He made no pretence of working. The only things in front of him were a bottle of Highland Park eighteen-year-old single malt, and a glass murky with his fingerprints. Every morning he would arrive, hung over, to find that his pending jobs were back on the desk, along with his telephone and calendar. Every morning he would sweep them all onto the floor. It was uncertain who replaced them, but he suspected it was Illyria.

No doubt it was also she who kept the calendar up-to-date. He had begun to notice a daily change in the tear-off sheet with its discrete Wolfram & Hart logo in one corner. Illyria was obsessed with such rituals, though she denied it. This morning, the day and date had told him that he'd been back in the land of the living for over a fortnight. He felt like a new man.

Sometimes Angel left him alone for days at a time; sometimes he was a frequent visitor, always knocking on the door. It was a hateful sound. Wesley remembered Fred's initial three months at the Hyperion, how strangely she would react when he brought her food and drink or something to read. Her words had been polite but her voice indicated she was stressed and interrupted. Right now he had an idea of how she must have felt. Fred…

And it all fell on him again, not that it ever went away. The pain of her absence. It was beyond endurance. It lanced through him. By comparison, Vail's knife wasn't even a bee sting. How could he possibly exist without her in the world, his dearest, his light in the shadows? The very idea of it was a sick joke. It was obvious Angel thought he understood. Wesley despised the vampire for that. Angel almost certainly believed that recent events had made the process of grieving more difficult. Filling his glass, Wes barked a laugh. This wasn't grief; this was infinite nightmare. Because she was gone.

Fred was gone.

"Wesley?"

He had been deep in the study of his whisky, seeing the void that was his universe in it. The voice, Illyria's voice, made him return to reality, or as close to it as he could get. How long had she been standing there, that mockery of her that was lost? He should have raved at her, but he was compelled by something he didn't understand to offer support. "Can I help you with something, Illyria?"

There was a difference. She seemed slightly nervous, like a pupil sent to the headmaster's office. Her body language was uncharacteristically distracted; she was avoiding his gaze, and – was that a magazine she was holding? "The toxic effects of the poison you ingest are cumulative. I would not see you come to harm."

Had she actually told him to lay off the booze? Illyria was a bundle of laughs. He put down the glass. "What's that you have?"

It might have been his imagination, but there seemed to be a hint of shyness in the way she placed the magazine on his desk. He half expected her to stand back and start wringing her hands. Wesley looked down. Not a magazine, he realised, an academic journal.

"It is _Modern Physics Review_," Illyria said. "The current edition."

Oh. Oh, God. It was in an earlier number of this journal that Fred's last, her _last_, paper had been published. In some ways it had ultimately brought the two of them together. He waited a moment. When he trusted himself to speak, he said, "I can see that. What's it doing on my desk?"

No, he wasn't imagining it. Illyria was worried. "Publication signifies acceptance and honour, does it not?"

"I suppose it can, yes."

"Then I have acceptance and honour."

"I don't understand."

Now she turned away and then back in two swift movements. "It was approved for publication. The thing I created."

Some time passed before he could comprehend what she was saying. "You wrote something, Illyria?"

"Yes."

Wesley glanced at the journal. "Using Fred's memories, her knowledge?"

"Yes."

The journal lay there, strangely threatening. He opened the cover, knowing what he would find. Her name was at the top of the list of authors. Winifred Burkle.

It was a remarkable achievement. The time taken for peer review and the publication process meant that Illyria must have written and submitted the piece months ago. Why she had worked on it in the first place he couldn't say. He couldn't even think about it. He could only think one thing. "You stole her body, you stole her memories, and now you steal her _name_? How dare you?"

"I thought you would be pleased." Her head cocked to one side faster and farther than usual, as if he'd slapped her.

He gritted his teeth, fighting back both anger and tears. Sometimes she could be so human. Sometimes it was as if a part of her… No. No, he mustn't think that, ever. There was nothing left of Fred. Nothing. Illyria called his scotch poison? Hope was poison.

Finally, he said, "I'm intrigued. You've accomplished something extraordinary, and you deserve to feel proud. Now I want you to leave and let me have some time alone."

A few seconds passed. She hadn't moved. "Will you read it?"

"Of course. Don't use her name again."

"Very well." The door closed softly behind her.

Wesley read for an hour. He didn't make it past the contents page of the journal. Winifred Burkle, Winifred Burkle, Winifred Burkle. His eyes moved across the letters over and over, caressing them. "Fred," he murmured, "Oh, Fred." Sobbing, he bowed his head, lowering it to rest against the desk. Eventually the shaking subsided and he slept, his tears slowly drying on her name.

- - -

"So, how's Wes?"

The smile fell from Angel's face. How was he supposed to answer that? Gunn looked at him expectantly. For the second time in three months, the attorney was returning to work after a stint in Medical. The last time, it was Wesley who'd put him there.

"It's been hard for him. Terrible. He's having trouble adjusting."

"To what, exactly?"

"To life," Spike said, catching them up. "Welcome back, Charlie boy." The three of them walked from the Medical corridor.

Gunn shook his head. "When did anyone last check on him?"

Angel remembered the times he'd been to that office recently. He tried to keep his voice light. "Wes? No one's been to his door in three days."

"Except Blue. She always goes to him, no matter what." As he often did now, Spike sounded depressed when Wesley was mentioned.

"Man shouldn't be left to rot like that," Gunn said. "He's had his private time, now he's gonna be needing people. Let's swing by his office."

It sounded like a good idea, like the right idea, but it wasn't. Wesley was in a fit of grief and desolation like none Angel had seen before. It made his own feelings following Buffy's death seem like a mild case of glumness. Wes had been given a spiritual check-up by the team of mages Wolfram & Hart contracted for such purposes, and passed easily. Had that not been the case, Angel would have suspected that the resurrection spell wasn't fully successful.

Part of Wesley was dead. Whatever had kept him going in the days, weeks, and months after Fred's demise wasn't there now. Angel was actually frightened of the man's wretchedness – it was more than any being should have to bear, like the torments of the damned. "Honestly, Gunn, I don't think we should disturb him. I've tried talking to him a few times, and they were all bad." The sounds in that office, the sounds of anguish.

"We can't just leave Wes. I'm going up there." Gunn's expression became subtly challenging. "You coming?"

Spike walked slightly ahead. "I'll come."

"We don't have to go crashing in; we'll just see how things are," Gunn said.

Angel shrugged. They would all regret this.

- - -

In his dream, Wesley was in the lobby of the Hyperion Hotel. It was a dream he knew well; he'd had it repeatedly since that unspeakable February day. The time of the dream was a happy one, a time of hope for him. It was before he'd taken Connor, before the ballet, before Billy. Fred was with him, recently returned from her abortive escape to Texas with her parents. She'd surprised them all, coming back to help and then asking to stay. Except that something in Wesley hadn't been surprised. The first time he'd seen her, she'd saved his life.

The dream differed from reality somewhat. Angel, Cordelia, and Gunn weren't present, and neither were Roger and Trish Burkle. There was just Fred and him. She was beautiful. He always forgot how the hotel's subdued lighting brought out the tones of her skin, eyes, and hair. This was the time when he'd begun to admit to himself that he had feelings for her. As he watched, a mosaic of character – from innocence to wisdom, from compassion to resolve, from sunlight to rich and vital darkness – shifted almost imperceptibly in her clever eyes. She opened her mouth. _Oh, no. Please don't say it, Fred._

"I belong here. Un-unless I don't. Which if-if you don't wanna put up with me, I completely understand..."

He knew the words he should say, and, God, he tried to say them – he tried with every shred of his will. But they were obscured in his mind by Father's growing laughter; braying, mocking, drowning his hope in its callous sound. And the laugh took hold of him, and became who he was, and he walked to Fred, arms outstretched as if to embrace her. But he knew he wouldn't do that. Instead, he gripped her shoulders and began to shove her backward up the steps to the doors.

She smiled uncertainly. "Whatcha doing, Wes?"

_Stop,_ he tried to order himself. _For God's sake, stop this time, please_. Of course, he didn't. The laughter wouldn't let him.

The Hyperion's doors drifted open. Beyond was purest emptiness; lightless, formless, nothingness. Fred was framed against it. She didn't resist as he once more pushed her toward her doom, but her face was sorrowful and uncomprehending.

They were on the threshold. She was on the edge of the end. Now it came.

"Please, Wesley, why can't I stay?"

Had she been hallucinating something like this in her final moments, living this event gone so hideously wrong? His broken heart tore again. She'd died in his arms, but she'd died thinking he'd rejected her? _Please, I'm begging you, don't send her away_. He knew it didn't matter how much he pleaded. In a second he would cast her out into nonentity.

However, this time she grabbed his arms before he could throw her from him. Quickly, seriously, she said, "Read my article. Hear me speaking. It's an excellent piece." Then he pushed. And she was gone.

"Please!" he shouted. Too late. He knew it was too late. "Please stay, Fred! Please!"

Wesley was still uselessly begging when the hotel dissolved around him.

- - -

His head sprang back as he dropped howling into wakefulness. An impressive whisky hangover beat away behind his temples, but he hardly felt it. The twisting agony in his soul easily blotted it out. It sounded loud in his office, his screaming.

Gunn, Spike, and Angel leapt through the door and into the room so fast they almost fell over one another. Funny. The Three Stooges. His scream went on and on, and he looked straight at their horrified faces. He didn't stop until his lungs were empty.

"God," Gunn said. "Wes, what is it?"

Wesley took a breath, and then spoke. He thought his voice sounded cloying and sick, and didn't care. In fact, he was glad. "Well, Charles, I just stubbed my toe. What else could it be?" Slowly, he swivelled his gaze at the blonde vampire. It was time. "You asked where I was during my tenure as a dead man. Would you like to know now?"

Spike looked taken aback for just an instant, and then nodded once, his face unreadable.

Gathering his thoughts, Wesley spoke slowly. "It's difficult to explain. I both was and was not myself. You three, this place, this world, this existence – none of it was important. Though I didn't know who I was, or even what 'I' meant, I was still Wesley. It was very human. Warm, nurturing, and kind. Presumably a paradise dimension of some sort."

Seconds passed while Spike just stared. He looked down and frowned. Then, meeting Wesley's eyes, he said, "You were taken from heaven. This dump is hell for you."

_You think you understand. Is that it?_ The guttural laugh that Wesley had somehow acquired snapped from his mouth. "Heaven? There's no heaven for me, Spike. I'm sorry – I think I misled you. One thing was important. She wasn't there. I felt it, the hole where she should have been, the incompleteness of myself without her. It was hell there, too. Everywhere is hell. There's no end to it, not even in oblivion."

The Three Stooges were now comically gaping at him. Wesley stood and moved around the desk. "Her soul is gone. Her soul!" He picked up a chair and threw it against the wall violently enough for one of the hardwood legs to shatter. His dartboard fell and rolled across the office, stopping at Angel's feet. "Do you understand what that means? She isn't _anything_. Do you understand?"

"Of course we do," Spike said gently.

"I think a part, a stupid, childish part of me had hoped that she still existed in some way. I had to die to find the truth." And the truth was that she had been burnt out of existence. So, there was no heaven for her, either. There was nothing for her. What had Angel called it? Another random horrible event in another random horrible world? Angel was mistaken. It was more than cruel and unjust – Wesley was intimately familiar with both of those things. It was wrong, deeply and profoundly wrong, as if some idiot god of fate had turned its baleful gaze upon Fred and destroyed her for the strange, bitter pleasure of slowly breaking its prettiest toy.

Narrowing his eyes, Wesley moved closer to Angel. "It rather makes me wonder exactly what I've devoted my whole life to. This is what she received for fighting on the side of righteousness? Snuffed out? Unmade? After-" A sob was wrenched from him. "After all the suffering she'd been through, the struggles she'd overcome? She was the most moral and good person I've ever known. We all die. We all expect to die. She, uniquely, was annihilated!" He shouted the last word.

What a face Angel had. There was pity, revulsion, and anger, all at war with each other. "Wes, I know," he said. "It isn't fair."

The laughter, Father's laughter. He remembered now when he'd first heard it. He'd been a very small boy and something had happened, some disappointment. He couldn't recall what it had been; probably it was the minor sort of frustration that seems like the end of everything to a child. Father had reacted by mocking him for his tears and asking him if he thought the world was a fair place. Wesley had replied that, yes, the world _was_ like that, amazed such a thing could be questioned. And father had begun to laugh at him, and laugh and laugh, crushing the innocence of his inadequate son.

Over the years Wesley had tried to ignore that sound and have hope, but every time the laughter had proven to be right, hadn't it? When Fred and he had become lovers he'd felt certain that Father was finally silenced, that hope had ultimately prevailed. What a pathetic child of a man he was.

And so now Angel had taken on the role of telling him that life was unfair, had he? Pointing out that it was juvenile to believe otherwise? Wesley's rage suddenly slipped its chains.

"You," he hissed at Angel through clenched teeth. "You brought us here. She was surprised that I thought the offer had some merit. And then you made the decision, your executive decision, so you could help Connor."

Slowly, Spike's head turned in Angel's direction. "So that's what you meant."

Angel's eyes closed and his head lowered.

"Connor?" Gunn said.

Might as well move to the next in line. "Spike, Angel told me what happened at the Deeper Well." Wesley was gratified to see Spike flinch. "She believed in you. She did everything she could to help you. You let her die."

Spike looked at the wall. "Thousands dead? She wouldn't have wanted it. You know that."

"Thousands, millions, billions of lives – what do they matter when set against a soul? Her soul?"

The vampire's voice shook very slightly. "We didn't know. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

Gunn's eyes were scared when Wesley looked at him. _You think I'm going to bring up your little deal with Sparrow? Oh, you're in for a surprise, Charles_. "You kept us apart."

"Wh-what?"

"You knew how I felt about her. You knew we were right for each other. Remember when you said that she and I were kindred souls?"

The other man mumbled something.

"Pardon?"

"Don't. It's like you said, she chose."

Another wave of anger broke within Wesley. "Did you think I was suggesting that you'd stolen her, like an object? Is that what you thought?" Gunn didn't answer. A tear rolled down his cheek. Wesley was softened slightly. "I had feelings for her and she had feelings for me. I'm not going to rehash the past, but you know exactly what I'm talking about. Perhaps you seemed like the right person for her at that point, perhaps the events at the ballet simply took over, or perhaps she found you more palatable than the man who had recently been doing a bad Jack Nicholson impression and chasing her around the Hyperion with an axe. But then and after, you knew she and I had a special bond. Had mine and your positions been reversed, I would have behaved differently."

Another silent tear fell.

"Stop it, Wes," Angel said. "You're being unreasonable." There wasn't very much of the moral high ground in his tone of voice, however.

"Oh, am I? Then perhaps you should leave."

They stared at each other for something like a minute. Angel broke eye contact and moved to the door.

"Yes, go," Wesley said. "Leave me like you always do."

Shaking his head, Spike followed Angel. Gunn looked appealingly at Wesley for a moment, and then he too left.

Wesley walked back behind his desk and sat down, because that was what he did. As he refilled his glass, his eye caught _Modern Physics Review_. Ah, yes. The article Fred, no, Illyria had wanted him to read. With an effort of will he was able to turn to page four and begin the piece. He started to read the title and only half understood it. It became clearer on the second attempt, but his attention was riveted on the final word, a word that had become ghastly to him:

_On P-dimensional Space Dynamics Concerning Compactification and Virtual Particles _

_in the Production and Transformation of the Atomic Shell_

Soon, he was engrossed.


	3. Chapter Three

Los Angeles. You see it at night and it shines. Like a beacon. You see it in the day through necro-tempered glass, and it stands for everything you've lost.

The buildings and streets seemed to go on forever, swarming with humanity. Right now Angel needed to look, to feel attached to the world, even as he was forever separated from it. Wesley might be insane with grief or whatever the hell it was, but his words stung. It _had_ been Angel's decision to work for Wolfram & Hart. Oh, Gunn would have come anyway, and probably so would Lorne. Fred was another story. She'd had real doubts; she might even have talked Wes out of it. It was hard to say exactly what would have happened. One thing was certain, though – there'd been some dreadful choices made in the last year, and even before that. He reluctantly turned around.

Spike was perched on Angel's desk. Gunn was collapsed in one of the tasteful chairs that lined the office, staring at the floor.

"Our memories were altered." There was barely a trace of accusation in Gunn's voice.

"It was part of the deal. Off the desk." Angel glared at Spike until the other vampire, smirking very slightly, stood up. "And now I'm thinking it might be the only way to help Wes."

The atmosphere in the office thickened. Gunn looked at him as if he were a stranger. "You mean, make him forget Fred? That's inhuman."

Folding his arms, Spike leaned against a wall. "It wouldn't work, anyway. You heard what he said, how he could feel she wasn't there. They were soul mates." A lost expression crossed his face. "Mystically, I mean."

That galled Angel for some reason. "I'm kind of fuzzy on the whole soul-mate thing, Spike. You're an expert?"

"Enough of an expert to see the poetry." Spike unfolded his arms. "Soul mates. They're the two parts of a whole. In life, maybe more than one life, they're close family, the best of friends, lovers." His eyes unfocused. It was obvious he was thinking of Buffy.

A surge of dislike passed through Angel. "I never knew you were such a romantic," he said in a flat voice.

A surprised look appeared on Spike's features. "I wasn't, really. A bit late for that. I was more of a neo-Romantic Revivalist." Then his eyebrows went up. "Oh, you meant the other kind of romantic."

Bitter understanding passed between them.

"The point is," Spike continued with a short and ungracious smile, "mated souls should be together. Fact of nature. When they're not, one cries out to the other. His soul's going to be crying forever." He dropped into the chair beside Gunn.

The motion seemed to rouse Gunn a little. "It's my fault they weren't with each other."

Angel walked to him and squatted beside his chair. "Wes doesn't really believe that. You shouldn't either."

"Angel's right. It was the grief talking," Spike said.

"Was it? English…" Gunn's hands came up and passed over his face. "He was my best friend. Took a bullet for me." When he turned his head to face Angel, his eyes were moist. "I looked up to him. I know I joked around, but I respected him. He was smart, precise, educated. Maybe that's why I went after her."

That didn't make sense. "I'm not following you."

"A part of me wanted to be like him. What he said just now was right. I knew there was a thing between them, the way they were with each other. I was sure they would get it together. So why did I start making moves? She was this cute sweet girl, but I didn't love her, not at first. He was crazy about her. What kind of man does that to his friend?"

"You're letting this get to you and you shouldn't," Angel said. "It wasn't the way you're making it sound, Gunn. Things happen. It's life." Was that true, though? Did things really just happen?

It seemed Gunn didn't think so. "Once, the man treated me like I was doing him a favour by hanging with him. You know how that felt? I paid him back by making him a wreck."

"What about Fred?" said Spike. "It takes two to tango."

"It's not simple. Things were different for her. She was still finding her feet. I think-I think she had feelings for both of us, just not the same."

Buffy. Angel sent Spike what he hoped was a hateful look and saw the same sentiments returned. He tried to listen to what Gunn was saying.

"After the ballet, I just forgot about Wes for a while. Then he went away." Gunn paused and glanced at Angel again. "That was because of Connor, right, that big bust up the two of you had?"

"Yeah."

Shaking his head very slightly, Gunn finished hurting himself. "After he went, she was always sticking up for him, worrying about him, wanting to call him, and then she went to him for help. That was when things started to end for me and her. You know the rest." He let out a frayed sigh. "I don't think she ever knew me. She sure wasn't the person I thought she was. But for a while, it was good. It wasn't real, but it was good, Angel."

"I know." So much guilt. And Gunn didn't deserve to feel it, not for liking a pretty girl. It was even possible he'd had no control over events. Angel remembered what the demon Skip had said about their lives, that they'd been manipulated to ensure the rising of Jasmine. If Wes had been with Fred, would he have retreated into himself and taken Connor like that? What if keeping them away from each other was part of the plan? No. No, that was far-fetched.

"My fault," Gunn said.

"Hey," There was some anger in Spike's voice. "Stop that. You lived your life. That bastard Knox, now he was in their way. When I was all ghostly, I saw things. Like the way he would arrive whenever the two of them were alone. Uncanny, that."

If Spike had intended to say anything else, it was interrupted by a soft knocking on the office door. For an instant, Angel expected it to open and reveal Knox standing there. He spoke loudly enough for the visitor to hear. "Not now."

The door opened a crack. "Angel, it's me. Could I have a moment of your time?" Wesley's voice. And, though sombre, it really was his voice, not the madman's syrupy tone of earlier. Spike and Gunn stared at Angel. Patting Gunn on the shoulder, Angel stood. "Come in, Wes."

Wesley stepped inside and glanced around the room, jolting a little when he saw who was there. "If you're busy, I can come back."

"Glad to have you here," Angel said, hoping his smile looked genuine.

You couldn't say Wesley was full of the joys of spring, but the funereal despair had left, and the old no-nonsense determination was in its place. Now the eyes were set and resolute, like blue steel; he was purposeful again, and – was that a magazine he was holding? Angel noticed he also had a foolscap pad. The bottle of scotch in Wes's other hand didn't do much to inspire confidence, but he crossed the room in three strides and held it out to Spike.

"Actually, I'm glad everyone's here," Wesley said. "I believe you're fond of single malts, Spike. Perhaps you'd finish this one for me."

Spike took the bottle hesitantly. "Cheers."

After an awkward few seconds, Wesley moved to the centre of the office. "I've been under a great deal of strain, but that does not excuse my behaviour and words. I can only tell you all how deeply sorry I am."

Was this actually the same person who'd said those hurtful things? Angel had the absurd feeling that Wes was apologising on behalf of someone else. "You weren't yourself."

"That's very kind of you, but I realise that what I said can't be taken back. Angel, Spike, the things I accused you of – it's unforgivable." It was amazing how different Wes sounded. Angel silently thanked whatever had worked this miracle.

Smiling and shaking his head, Spike spoke kindly. "You're right. Can't forgive something when there's nothing to forgive."

Wesley made a sound, something like a sigh. He said to Gunn, "I need to apologise to you in particular. What I said was wrong in so many ways. I can hardly look you in the face."

That made two of them, it seemed. But Gunn said, "Forget about it, man. It's in the past."

"Gunn, I-"

"Drop it, Wes. That'd be best all round."

"Of course." A moment passed between them. Then Wesley thumbed through the magazine and marked a place with his finger. "I want you all to look at this."

- - -

"Can you run that by me again?" Angel wasn't sure he'd heard Wesley right. He stood behind the desk with Spike and Gunn while Wes sat and turned the journal's pages.

"This article was written by Illyria." The voice Wesley used was level, giving nothing away. "_Modern Physics Review_ has a reputation for showcasing controversial material, work that pushes the limits of acceptable science. Illyria's paper falls into that category."

"Is it any good?" Spike asked.

"It's ground-breaking." Wes's matter-of-fact delivery left little room for argument. "As I said, though, controversial. And an editorial comment lists several problems. The article deals with, among other things, the role of human consciousness in the production of atomic energy states. It's not a new idea by any means, but the editors find the tone speculative at times."

Already, Angel's brain was starting to hurt, and the outlandish math on the page in front of him wasn't helping. To humour Wesley, he did his best to follow what was being said.

"Also, the mathematics far exceeds what is required, and there are two equations that appear to have been-" Wes read from the journal "-'randomly inserted.' The editors decided the paper was of sufficient worth to publish in this form, with the faults highlighted."

It was hard not to smile when, as if it would make things clearer, Gunn leaned down to bring his eyes closer to the article. "So Illyria got it wrong? She used stuff from Fred's memories but didn't know what she was writing?"

"That was also my assumption." Wesley shivered. "Now I'm not sure." He pointed out two frightening-looking sums he'd circled. "These are the redundant equations. The first provides the value of quantity F; the second provides the value of quantity B. Neither F nor B has any relevance to the rest of the paper. As you can see, both equations are simple algebra."

"Yeah," said Angel.

"I can see that," said Spike.

"Sure," said Gunn.

"I thought it would be good for Illyria to understand her error, so I solved the equations. Each answer is expressed concisely, using a formula of powers. When these are calculated, the solutions to both equations turn out to be rather large numbers." Wes opened the foolscap pad. "Here."

Angel's eyes moved over the page. He hoped he wasn't supposed to understand this.

F 10100891001191001110101010110011101001010085691001010011101001100111001510010411111110101001100111111010110111111  
10111011001155811111011145510000971111 

B 10100811010010111110011110011971110111001111101191001110100811010031100511001051110111110101786111110010110011111  
10101

"It isn't easy to see the pattern at first," Wesley was saying, "but these numbers immediately struck me as unusual. Clearly, some of this is can be read as binary, while some must be in another base, most likely denary. Initially I thought it might be a compound system of notation. Then I realised there is a key of sorts at the start of the first solution. A five digit binary number is followed by an eight and a nine and then another five digit binary number. It soon becomes apparent that F and B in fact contain series of binary numbers with either five or four digits. Certain sequences often repeat, such as one zero zero one one, and one zero one zero zero."

The lines of ones and noughts merged into each other. It was difficult to know whether to be impressed or worried by what Wesley was saying. "You _can_ see a pattern? Are you sure?"

"It's straightforward translation, not dissimilar to deciphering a primitive written language." After a pause, Wesley added, "And I had the lab crunch the numbers. By that stage I knew what to look for. Sometimes a one occurs by itself, which made certain sections a little slippery, but it was fairly simple to-"

"Wes." Gunn put a hand on the desk. "What's the punch line here?"

"I'll get to the point. The numbers break down as follows." Wes turned to the next page on the pad:

10100, 8, 9, 10011, 9, 10011, 1010, 10101, 10011, 10100, 10100, 8, 5, 6, 9, 10010, 10011, 10100, 1100, 1, 11001, 5, 10010, 4, 1111, 1110, 10100, 11001, 1111, 10101, 10111, 1, 1110, 1110, 1, 10011, 5, 5, 8, 1111, 10111, 4, 5, 5, 10000, 9, 7, 1111

10100, 8, 1, 10100, 10111, 1, 10011, 1, 10011, 9, 7, 1110, 1, 1100, 1111, 1011, 9, 10011, 10100, 8, 1, 10100, 3, 1100, 5, 1, 10010, 5, 1110, 1111, 10101, 7, 8, 6, 1111, 10010, 11001, 1111, 10101

"When converted into denary, the binary numbers all become two digits. Like so." He turned another page:

20, 8, 9, 19, 9, 19, 10, 21, 19, 20, 20, 8, 5, 6, 9, 18, 19, 20, 12, 1, 25, 5, 18, 4, 15, 14, 20, 25, 15, 21, 23, 1, 14, 14, 1, 19, 5, 5, 8, 15, 23, 4, 5, 5, 16, 9, 7, 15

20, 8, 1, 20, 23, 1, 19, 1, 19, 9, 7, 14, 1, 12, 15, 11, 9, 19, 20, 8, 1, 20, 3, 12, 5, 1, 18, 5, 14, 15, 21, 7, 8, 6, 15, 18, 25, 15, 21

"That's the purpose of the binary, to differentiate two digit numbers from one digit numbers." Wes stopped talking. Now they obviously _were_ supposed to understand.

"Alright, I give up," Angel said to break the silence. "What is this?"

An exasperated noise escaped Wesley's mouth. "Dancing men."

"What?"

"As in the Sherlock Holmes story."

Sherlock Holmes – those funny little yarns in _The Strand_. Darla had done her lady-of-fashion thing when it came to magazines like that one. She claimed they were for the lower orders.

"Never read it," said Angel, glancing at Spike and Gunn. They both shook their heads.

Running a hand through his hair, Wes turned to face them. "Well, do the numbers one to twenty-six mean anything to you?"

"Something, maybe," Spike said, noncommittal.

Again, Gunn leaned down to peer more closely. After a while he said, "I got nothing."

Wesley looked at them all. He seemed to be in pain, but was that the ghost of a smile at the corner of his mouth? "This is the most basic form of numerical cipher."

A code. Something clicked in Angel's mind. The numbers one to twenty-six… "The numbers stand for letters."

"Exactly. One merely has to add spacing and punctuation." Wesley picked up the foolscap pad and a pen, quickly scribbled something, and then threw the pad back onto the desk. He'd written two lines in block capital letters.

THIS IS ONLY THE FIRST LAYER. DON'T YOU WANNA SEE HOW DEEP I GO?

THAT WAS A SIGNAL, OK? IS THAT CLEAR ENOUGH FOR YOU?

- - -

No one said anything for a while. At least, Wesley didn't think so. He might simply be too affected by the words on the desk before him to hear anything.

Fred no longer existed. He knew that in his heart and soul, and it was worse than futile to hope otherwise. Yet, if she was truly gone, what was this? A shiver went through him again. It wasn't just the words. He could almost feel her presence in the article – the nerdy code that was practically tailor-made for him to unravel, the flicker of impatience. He involuntarily smiled with recognition, and then squashed the smile. It was important to remain level-headed. When his mind felt a little clearer, Wes began to speak.

"The second message is something Fred said to me once." He tried not to show the others the sweetness and pain it stirred in him. "Illyria could be aware of it. But the first message I heard in a dream, shortly after Fred's death."

His head tilting to one side, Spike traced a finger over the hastily-written words. "That's what we're calling these, then? Messages?"

Wes could sense instant scepticism from the vampire. He'd expected it. Emotionally, he himself felt certain that this couldn't be what it seemed. It couldn't.

"Just to be clear, Wes." Angel's voice was nervous. "You're saying Illyria can read minds or implant dreams? That _is_ what you're saying?"

This was going to be difficult. He got to his feet and walked to the other side of the desk so he could confront them. They already thought he was mad, most likely, and there was a worse problem – how could he open their minds to the possibility of something he couldn't bring himself to believe? All three of them were looking at him like he was a slightly unpleasant zoo exhibit. "I'm suggesting that it wasn't a dream. Perhaps it was a vision, or something like a slayer's prophetic fugue."

"Where are you going with this?" Gunn asked. It was clear from his frown that he knew exactly where Wesley was going, and didn't want him to arrive.

Neither did Angel. "You've never had a vision before."

"No."

Spike said what the others were so obviously thinking. "I know what you're hoping for, but you need to let go if you can. She's gone."

The jaw-dropping look of horror and outrage on Angel's face as he turned to Spike was amusing. Wesley willed himself not to laugh. It wouldn't be a good thing to do at this point. "I'm not hoping. I can't hope. I daren't hope. I know that Fred is lost. But, I wonder, how do I know?"

There were a few more beats of silence.

Poor Gunn looked sick. "Sparrow. He told me there was nothing left of her. He said her soul was consumed in the fires of resurrection."

"I was there. I heard. Then I asked you if it was true. I have no idea why I would do that." Wes looked away from them briefly. "By that point you were already convinced. So was I." And he had been. It was as if absolute proof of her soul's destruction had been given to him in those few words. "Illyria very quickly proved Sparrow wrong in at least one sense. She told me that fragments of Fred _did_ still exist: her memories. Consumed is a rather ambiguous word. It can mean swallowed, absorbed. Tell me, Gunn, is Sparrow the sort of man who would mislead us?"

"Well, yeah…" Gunn's eyes narrowed, widened, and then steadied. "But you know there's more than Sparrow. Knox-"

"Knox said she was 'so much more', beyond flesh and perfection."

Incredulous, Spike and Gunn looked at each other. "No," Spike said. "No, that isn't what he told us."

Wesley raised a hand. "You weren't even there, Spike."

The vampire blinked. His eyebrows drew together.

"Knox must have meant Illyria," said Gunn.

"When did Knox ever call Illyria 'she'?"

"He didn't. He called Illyria 'it'. That was how I knew he was a part of something. He slipped up…" Gunn trailed off.

Wes pressed on. "Illyria refers to Fred as the shell. She tells me that the shell cannot come back to me. But she also says that she, Illyria, is within the shell and bound to it."

Angel hadn't spoken in minutes, though Wesley had seen his eyes follow the discussion. When he did speak, he sounded puzzled. "Wait. What Sparrow said – you didn't check it?"

"What would I check it against?"

"I don't know – an ancient text, a prophecy, something."

Wesley's frustration at himself, at all of them, began to creep into his voice. "Information on the Old Ones is rather scarce, Angel, reliable information even more so. Besides, from what I can tell, Illyria's resurrection is a unique event."

Angel stared at him, and then slammed a fist into the desk hard enough to crack its surface. "Damn it, Wes! I asked if you were sure. You said you were sure."

"Actually, I said nothing. You didn't pursue the matter further." He looked at each of them. "We have only Sparrow's word to go on. So do you feel differently now, any of you?" Their faces were somehow both blank and thoughtful. "I ask because I'm still convinced that Fred is gone. It's strange, isn't it? We were determined to save her; then we were determined to bring her back. Our determination vanished in the blink of an eye. Because of something Sparrow said."

There was confusion in Gunn's voice. "But, Wes. She's-"

"Gone. Yes, I know. We've said that often, haven't we?"

Surprisingly, Angel's face took on an expression of dawning understanding. He moved to the window and gazed out. "We've been played."


	4. Chapter Four

Let's pretend. A bedtime story. It might give the man some comfort, but just wait 'til he found out the truth. Again. Spike shook his head. Fred still alive? Yeah, right. He'd like it to be true, but then he'd like Mother to be here, and not a leering vamp, either. He'd like it if things had worked out somehow with Cecily, Dru, or Buffy. Especially Buffy. He'd like it if Dawn and him were still friends.

William had always wanted a sister, and Dawn was something like one for a while. But Fred, she'd been almost the real thing. Her death shook him more than anyone realised. It wasn't that he'd been interested in getting her into bed. She was good-looking in her own way, but not his type of girl at all. More pretty than sexy, at least as far as he was concerned. Everything about Fred and him could be said in seventeen syllables and three lines. It was a different poem for her and Wesley, though. Something with as many cantos as Dante and the gentle touch of Keats. He sighed. Fred and Wes – real fireworks there. Hell, everyone in the building had known it. For some reason those two hadn't got fixed-up with each other, not until it was too late. Stupid bloody world.

Fred had been Spike's only friend here. He'd been adamant he wouldn't let her die. But that's exactly what he'd done. Wesley was bitter about that? No wonder – Fred had been his soul's mate. Spike was devastated at losing her; God knew what Wes was feeling.

As he crossed the lobby he glanced to the left. His spirits lifted. Pammy, Harmony's replacement, was on reception. Pam was a dish, if ever there was one; all flesh and hips and curves and breasts. The complete package. He'd only had a couple of chances to flirt with her when she'd worked in Accounts, but there were more opportunities now she was Angel's PA. He walked over to the desk, eyes locked with hers. "Pam," he said, lowering his voice, "when are the two of us going to make each other happy bunnies?"

The smile she gave him had to be her naughtiest smile, the one she kept in reserve to quicken a male pulse. He didn't have a pulse, but he could still appreciate it. She arched an eyebrow as only a woman with some history could. "You know I'm not that kind of girl, Spike." Those green eyes of hers, so coy, so wanton. What kind of girl was she? The sort a man could sink his teeth into. So to speak.

He returned her look. "It's not easy for me to be a gentleman around you, love."

That smile again. "Is that why you're carrying a liquor bottle instead of flowers for me?"

Laughing, he flipped the bottle over, sloshing what was left of the scotch. "This? Present from a friend." The words were out of his mouth before he realised what he was saying. Wesley was someone he considered a friend. Who'd have thought it? "I'd love to stay and chat, but I'm on a mission."

Pammy leaned forward, doing the cleavage thing and knowing she was doing it. "Something dangerous? Because I like dangerous."

"There might be danger," he said, getting an eyeful. It wasn't a lie, exactly. Blue could be tetchy.

"If you come back in one piece, we could talk about it over a drink. I could debrief you."

Bingo. He gave her a look to tell her he understood. "Could you, now? I might see you later, then." Spike grinned at her and then strutted away from the desk. He couldn't help strutting. A date with Pammy. At least that was something to look forward to.

_You don't have to believe it,_ Angel had said yesterday. _Make like you do; the truth will come out._ Yeah, except that they already knew the truth, and it wasn't the smoke and mirrors of a grieving man. It was as sure as the sunset. But, no – Angel was on one of his crusades. He wanted to know if Blue understood anything of what she'd written in that article. _Tread gently, Spike, _he'd said. _Don't mess it up. You've got that rapport with her. Use it._

Walking through the corridors, Spike raised a hand in greeting to the people he knew, tried to intimidate a few he didn't like the look of. When he got to the lab he stuck his head through the door – lots of nerds doing their nerdy things – then went on to Observation Room One, Illyria's room. He saw her through the window, crouched, facing the wall. She was probably doing that frozen, lizard-between-meals act of hers. Oh, well. She'd just have to wake up. Opening the door, he said, "Hey Blue, Wes sent me down here…" His voice faded.

Most of the wall space was covered with writing. No, not writing – equations, like the ones in the journal. Illyria slowly turned. She was stooped, and some hair fell over her face. There was a magic marker in one of her hands. Something, he couldn't say what, made him think of Fred. He mentally slapped himself across the face. All the "I believe in fairies" talk was getting to him.

"Mind if I interrupt your decorating?" he said, and then leapt back as she dropped the marker and straightened, her body melting and shimmering. Everything changed: hair, skin, eyes, clothes. She was Fred, holding a paint roller.

"In a minute, I just wanna finish this section." Fred's voice. Her expressions, mannerisms, the lot. It was even more frightening and depressing than he'd imagined it would be. She rolled the roller on a blank patch of wall, then melted and shimmered and looked like Illyria again. Crouching once more and taking up the marker, she started writing. Very slowly, Spike relaxed.

"Don't do that. It's not fair on us who knew her."

"I behave however I wish," she said, rising gracefully. Her eyes moved over the walls. "The shell would do this during periods of agitation." She shot him a blue glance. "I am not agitated."

Funny she should say that, because he'd never seen her more uptight. "Didn't say you were."

After staring at him blankly for a while, she started walking. She made a circuit of the room, one arm outstretched, fingers brushing over the equations like she was petting them. "These sigils and glyphs, they speak to me in tongues that babble. I am drawn to them."

Speak to me in tongues that babble? Spike tried not to roll his eyes. This was a way into finding out what she knew. "It's all Greek to me, too," he said, looking more closely at the nearest wall. Oh. A lot of it actually _was_ Greek. Alright. Tread gently. "So you're not clued-up on all this stuff?"

Illyria carefully poised herself. "I require more knowledge of the magic called science. I see what the shell understood, but I do not understand her understanding."

Spike worked his way through that. Did it answer Angel's question or not? He was still trying to think of something else to ask her when her head dropped a notch, eyes glaring at the bottle in his hand.

"That belongs to Wesley."

Didn't look like she was after a bunch of flowers, then. "He passed it on to me. Think he's decided to give it a rest for a while."

She didn't quite not smile. Weird. It was there for a second; then it was gone. "You said he sent you here."

Gently. "Yeah, it's about that article of yours. There're a few things he's puzzling over."

Her shoulders sank a tiny bit. "Why could he not come himself? He has been behaving strangely since he returned. I assumed the Burkle persona for him as he died, at his request. Now he finds my presence painful."

At his request. Best not to think too closely about what that little scene had been like. "No, it isn't that. He's just tied up at the moment."

The shoulders sprang up again. "Is he with Mistress Spanks-A-Lot?"

Bloody hell. Old Wes was a dark horse, wasn't he? "Not unless that's the name Angel's using these days."

Strange. She didn't move at all, but he could see her relief. Then her head cocked. "People scream."

He grinned. Right, love, people scream. Scream in tongues that babble.

Illyria's voice dropped in pitch. "Listen."

The grin slipped from his face. There was a sound outside. People were screaming.

- - -

Angel made a silencing gesture and listened. Nothing. "I guess I'm jumping at shadows. Go on."

"I was just thinking about Lorne," Wesley said wearily. "Do you think it will take long to find him?"

Getting the empath to come back here was the real difficulty. "The Legal Department has extensive resources. One missing demon shouldn't be a problem. Gunn will take care of it." The attorney was under instructions to use all means necessary.

A sad frown creased Wes's face. "I don't think I apologised to Gunn adequately."

"He understands. We all do."

"I was wide of the mark as well as spiteful. Quite simply, it was fate that Fred and I would never be together."

Maybe that was true. And maybe it was time to stop letting fate push them around. "Screw destiny, that's what Fred told us."

"She did say screw it, yes." Tears began to fill Wesley's eyes and he roughly wiped them away. "I'm sorry. I miss her."

_So do I_, Angel thought, but stayed silent. He didn't want to belittle his friend's grief by comparing it with his own. After looking at Wes for a long moment, he said, "I think she hung on, Wes. I don't believe it, but I think it."

Wesley nodded. "I feel the same. It hurts." He picked up _Modern Physics Review_. "Fred is resourceful. She knows how to endure, how to hide. If anyone could survive Illyria's resurrection-"

A single knock sounded on the door and it opened. Vincent Lamlane, one of the junior researchers in Wesley's department, moved a step into the room. "I'm sorry to interrupt, Mr Angel, Mr Wyndham-Pryce. There's an emergency down in Records. The mystical scroll section is fading from this dimension."

"Again?" Wesley sounded more tired than ever. He got to his feet slowly. "What is the point of me drawing up a list of safety procedures if they aren't followed?" Turning to Angel, he said, "There's a substantial amount of irreplaceable material in that section. I should go there to supervise damage limitation and bash some heads together." He looked at the researcher.

Lamlane stared at him.

"Not literally," Wesley added.

Angel smiled faintly as the two men left the office. Wes was beginning to think about his work again. And he'd just talked about Fred in the present tense. Hopefully, that was a good thing.

- - -

It was a commotion in the lab. There were raised voices, then silence. Spike met Illyria's eyes and moved quickly toward the door, almost taking it in the face as Pammy burst into the room. She moaned his name, clinging to him.

He let this go on for a little while, and then gently moved Pam to arm's length. She was scared out of her wits, that much was plain. His earlier thoughts about her seemed wicked now, and not in a good way. Here she was, a fragile human with a thousand dreams and frustrations abruptly exposed on her face. He felt ashamed. "What is it?"

"Out there in the lab." Her lungs kept grabbing breaths.

Illyria was already half out of the room. "I will investigate."

"Wait up," Spike called after her.

Before he'd taken a step, Pammy blocked his way, hugging him again with unexpected strength. "Please don't. I need you with me."

He held her. "Just slow everything down. You'll be fine here. Now let me go and take a look."

"No!" Pam's grip tightened as he tried to move away from her.

"It's okay," Spike said, only half listening to his own words. Through the open door he could see Blue retreating from something. What did Illyria ever back away from? Another figure started to come into view. He almost laughed when he saw it was one of the nerds from the lab menacing her. Some little weasel gone stir crazy. No surprise, down here. She probably didn't want to hurt him. Now Spike thought about it, he couldn't remember her ever really hurting anyone outside of battle.

At that moment, Illyria darted past the silver thing the man was holding and grasped his lab coat. She threw him head first into the ceiling. _Really_ into the ceiling – his upper body was left buried in the concrete; his lower body hung and twitched.

Caught somewhere between shock and a desire to applaud, Spike let go of Pammy. They both stared through the doorway as Blue turned her head to look at them almost apologetically. Then her eyes flashed a warning.

Spike reacted, the bottle smashing as he dropped it and raised his arms. A sharp, ripping agony went through the left one. He looked, and was amazed to see it impaled on a stake. The point was maybe half an inch away from his chest, and bang-on target. Even more startling, Pammy held the other end. There was nothing to see of the woman he'd been getting to know; her expression was cunning, but also vacant. Pain flared all the way up to his shoulder as she pulled out the stake for another swing.

No time to think. Take her out now. But he couldn't, because Pam was flying away from him, her empty hand sticking forward in a fist. Hell, what was that? A train had hit him from behind? No, no train. It was the wall. Sexy little Pammy had just punched him clear across the room. He should have seen it coming. He'd been looking too hard at the hand with the stake in it. Sloppy.

Pam charged. He got to his feet, but it wasn't smooth and easy. Striking the wall so violently had damaged things inside him. It took way too much effort just to feint and let her stab to his right. Really, that should have been it for her. A good kick to her undefended back. He tried it, but broken bones grated and he wasn't able. She swung her arm again.

It bounced back as Illyria stood between them and the stake rebounded off her body armour. With a swift and efficient movement, she lifted Pam, turned her horizontal, and brought the woman's body down over a raised knee. The shattering noise was horrific, even to Spike. Pammy fell in two halves.

Illyria glanced questioningly over her shoulder at him. Limping, he moved to her side and they both stared at what was on the floor.

"Well now, there's a thing," he said.

Fizzing, buzzing, and popping sounds accompanied the sparks jetting from Pam's upper torso and spitting more feebly from the half where her nice legs kicked at the air. Instead of the red and slimy inside of a human body, there was a mystifying heap of iridescent coiled metal. Her flesh became faint and vanished, as did her smell. A glamour. Then there was just a broken machine on the floor.

Somewhere in the building a gun fired once. After a pause, seven more shots sounded.

"Wesley is in danger," Illyria said and immediately broke into a run. She coolly snapped off the hanging man's foot as she left the room and threw it to Spike.

Sure enough, there was oddly-coloured stuff sticking out of it. It looked like tin foil would if it were alive. Spike set off hobbling after Blue, swearing as he almost tripped over the silver object RoboNerd had been carrying. Wait a minute – it was the thing Wes had used to drain Illyria's power that time. Looked like the plan here had been to finish the job.

- - -

The reception desk was unattended when Spike arrived back in the lobby. No more flirting eyes or naughty smiles. What was it with him and robot girls, anyway? The door to Angel's office opened and the boss shuffled out, hunched over. One of his eyes was swollen shut and there was a massive wound on the left side of his chest. He was in a fair bit of pain, by the look of things. But when he saw Spike, his face became expressionless, and he stood upright. Very nonchalant. A few choice insults sprang to mind, but before Spike could use any he realised he'd done the same thing.

"Caught off guard?" Angel said, approaching him.

In more ways than one. "Yeah. Robot. You?"

The other vampire nodded and glanced at the elevators as the doors on one opened. A dour but unhurt Wesley emerged, eyes widening as he noticed their injuries.

"Lamlane?" Angel said, sitting on the reception desk.

The faintest smile tugged at one corner of Wesley's mouth. "Yes. It was obvious there was no inter-dimensional disturbance. The smell and the dust told me that the air had been still in Records for some time." He shrugged. "I was ready for him, but it took eight shots to bring him down." His eyebrows raised and lowered quickly and dispassionately. "So – three of us attacked."

"Four," Spike said. He looked at Wes and saw no comprehension. "She didn't find you?"

That nasty shiver took hold of Wesley for a moment. "Illyria and I only talked briefly. When she saw I was no longer at risk she seemed to lose interest. A good thing, too. I don't trust myself to be around her right now."

Understandable. That was, after all, the reason Wes hadn't gone to see her today. Spike explained what had happened: the robots, the attempt to drain Blue dry with Flash Gordon's pop gun, and the bedlam he'd found in the lab where a few people had tried to stop it from being removed.

"Classic tactics for taking out a small group. Separate, isolate, eliminate." Wesley punctuated each word by shifting his gaze between Spike and Angel.

"It was a hit on the Black Thorn," Angel said.

Wes began to nod then stopped. "Where's Gunn?"

"In the field." Nervousness spread over Angel's features. "He's found Lorne."

The unease was infectious, Spike saw, because Wes began to look the same. Of course he did. In his heart he must know that, as soon as they got Blue to sing, his castles would come crashing out of the air. "Is Lorne far from here?"

"He's working at a club in Malibu; Gunn's gone up there to bring him in. They should be here tomorrow, and then we'll know."

Spike snorted involuntarily and instantly cursed himself for it, because Wesley looked at him and started shaking. This time he didn't stop.


	5. Chapter Five

It was a difficult night. Angel had told him to rest, but that wasn't really an option, was it? He'd returned to his apartment, because Illyria sometimes arrived at Fred's. Yet he wasn't alone in his own place – it was haunted. Their brief and dear time together. The night she'd come to him for help with Seidel; the way her face had softened when she learnt he'd been keeping track of her. Her standing at the door after the Billy incident, not only forgiving but trying to support him. Torment, all of it.

The new tiles in the shower were quite cheerful. Faith had done him a favour when she'd removed the old ones. Water ran over Wesley as he tried to wash the fatigue from his mind. There'd been no sleep, and he hadn't eaten in twenty hours. His tired thoughts wandered back to the events of yesterday.

To keep himself occupied he'd spent the remainder of the afternoon supervising blood tests on the entire Wolfram & Hart staff. Two more robots were discovered, one in the Legal Department, one in the Entertainments Division. Clearly, they were placed to eliminate Gunn and Lorne. An assassin for each of them, even Illyria, although that one may have originally been intended for Fred. Why they were sent and by whom were mysteries, just as they had been the first time. Another unanswered question was why they had revealed themselves with two of their targets absent. The remaining robots posed no danger – they seemed lost without something to aim for, things that no longer had a function. God, he knew how that felt.

It had been twenty minutes now. The water was starting to lose its temperature, and he hadn't even picked up a bar of soap. Actually, he hadn't moved. Quickly and mechanically, he washed and turned off the shower.

Toward the end of the day's final meeting, Spike had mentioned, seemingly as an afterthought, that Illyria was "writing on the walls". A meaningless recycling of memory, or another suggestion of the impossible? Wes needed to know the answer, but dreaded it being the wrong one. The dread was electric and sharp in the pit of his stomach. If Lorne came, was able to read Illyria, and pronounced that there was no trace of Fred, it would be the end of everything. The darkness that had beckoned him for so long would finally absorb him utterly, he knew. And he would welcome it. For the loss of that most rare and lovely soul could only mean that this world was not worth the fight.

He dried and dressed himself, then left an apartment that had become a memento mori funhouse. Ten crawling minutes in the LA traffic had passed before he realised he'd forgotten to shave. It seemed a bad omen.

There was someone he didn't recognise on reception. She knew who he was, though, and directed him to the senior staff conference room, where a meeting was in progress. On the way he had to stop and lower his head as vertigo flooded his consciousness. To those passing in the corridor it must have looked absurdly like he was bowing. In a way, he was. Bowing under the panic that sent him cold and left pins and needles in his mind.

Angel was singing, badly, when Wesley reached the conference room. "My home lies deep within you; And I've got my own place in your soul; Now, when I look out through your eyes; I'm young again, even though I'm very old."

Wesley listened at the door until the song ended, not breathing. Lorne spoke. "You know Barry didn't write that, don't you?"

Drawing on the last of his strength, Wes was able to wrestle the panic down into something small enough for him to enter the room. He was in time to see Angel's crest-fallen expression.

"Good morning, everyone," Wesley said, astounded at how calm his voice was. Good mornings were mumbled. Gunn gestured in welcome and pulled out a chair. Acknowledging him with a nod, Wes sat in it. "Hello, Lorne. Do I have to sing? I'm not sure I can."

The demon smiled warmly. "Hi, Wes. I'm not happy about being here, but seeing you is a plus. I don't need to hear a note."

Spike smiled, too. "You got off lightly. Don't know which was worse, having to sing myself or having to listen to him." Raising an eyebrow, he jabbed a thumb back toward Angel.

Ignoring this, Angel said, "How are you feeling today, Wes?"

"Tolerable. Can we get this over with?" It was going to be the wrong answer. He knew it. Here in cold reality, it was obvious. But there were so many things hinting at the other possibility. The struggle between doubt and the evidence began again. Wesley shivered.

Lorne stood, smiling humourlessly as Spike also rose to his feet. "A nursemaid, huh?"

"She trusts me," Spike said. "Might have a better chance of getting through to her if I'm there."

"Right." Lorne dead-panned laughter, keeping his gaze conspicuously away from Angel. But he gave Wes another smile, this one genuine, and then moved to the door with Spike in tow. "Let's go hear the bluebird sing."

- - -

It seemed to Spike that, yeah, nursemaid was the long and short of it. Embarrassing. Lorne and him walked in a not-too-companionable silence until they reached the Science Division corridor.

"I'll do the talking to begin with," Spike said then, not allowing any space for discussion into his voice. "She's been getting skittish, lately. Not sure what she'll do when she sees you."

Lorne stopped walking. "Skittish? Her?" His face became thoughtful. It looked strange on him. Then he slipped on one of those sarcastic masks that Spike knew well, even though he'd hadn't seen his own reflection for a good long while. The mask turned his way. "You know, I'm intrigued. The songs say the same thing. None of you believe this."

Hard to find a good answer to that. Probably because there wasn't one. Spike sighed quietly. "Yeah. Doesn't hurt to make sure, though. We could be wrong."

"We're not, and it does hurt." There was a pained expression on the demon's face. He looked the way Spike felt.

"I know."

Rubbing his temples, Lorne said, "The only reason I'm here is that, when it comes to Fred, I still have a little hope. Silly, isn't it?"

Spike shrugged with his eyebrows and looked at the floor.

They began to walk, again without speaking, the rest of the way to Observation Room One. When they arrived there, Spike glanced through the window. Blue was standing, head cocked and eyes empty, one hand reaching out. The magic marker she held still touched the wall, like she'd been halfway through writing something when she'd just, well, stopped. He opened the door and held it for Lorne, who entered the room ahead of him.

No movement from Illyria.

"Brought someone to see you," Spike said.

Still nothing, as if she was waiting to catch a fly, or something. Then a small shift of the head. Her eyes gradually swivelled toward Lorne. After gazing at him for a few moments she said, "Krevlorneswath. The mind-raping jester."

Lorne spread his arms. "Hey, I missed you, too. How about a hug?"

Jester – she got that right. A funny man. This was such a funny situation, after all. Spike stepped between them. "You know the drill, Blue. Sing a song, and Lorne here can see how things are going for you."

"I will not be hoped." Her eyes flicked back and forth, as if confused. "I will not be probed."

"It's just like the tests." Spike held up his clipboard. "See? Not like he'll be reading your mind."

Illyria raised her chin. "My mind would make his stunted brain burst were he foolish enough to attempt it."

All of a sudden Lorne was standing in front of her. Great. That was right in her combat zone. Not that Lorne knew it. "There you are, then, blueberry muffin. You're safe. I just want to get an idea of what your aura is like."

"Do not call me blueberry muffin." There was murder – no, genocide – in her eyes. Moving to Lorne's side, Spike braced himself.

Raising his hands, placating, a bit poncy, Lorne said, "Whatever's good for you. So what songs did the Old Ones sing? I'm guessing romantic ballads. Hmmm. Maybe something folksy."

The danger within Illryia's gaze instantly evaporated. Almost before Lorne finished speaking, she said, "The shell knew many songs."

Lorne smiled encouragingly. "How about you wow us with one of those?"

There was a weird moment of calm. Motionless, vacant, and unblinking, Illyria stared at Spike and Lorne. And that's how she stayed when her mouth opened and a huge sound came out of it: "R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Find out what it means to me."

Spike dropped the clipboard, and, bemused, turned his head to look at Lorne. His fingers clicking time, the empath pouted appreciatively. Admittedly, Blue had a surprisingly good singing voice.

"R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Take care, TCB. Ohhhhh."

Now the bloody demon joined in. "Sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me."

"A little respect."

"Sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me."

It was surreal. The room echoed with the two of them. Blue and green should never be seen; Mother used to say that. As for whether they should be heard…

"Whoa, babe."

"Just a little bit."

"A little respect."

"Just a little bit."

Spike turned on his heel. "I'll just wait outside, then." When he was in the corridor he pressed his back against the wall and hung his head in his hands. Another time he might have found all this hilarious, but not now. Soon Lorne would come out of there, and Spike would have to face losing Fred all over again. Then there was the happy job of telling Wesley. Epic tragedy for breakfast. The man would fall. Oh, they'd all try to hold him up, no doubt. Wouldn't help him, though. In Wes's office a few days ago, Spike had seen someone who'd lost the whole world. It was a look he'd noticed several times in the past, mostly when he'd just made someone watch while he slaughtered their entire family. Something like that, it made a person's universe crumble. Seeing the expression back on Wesley's face, confirmed, would be hard to bear. After all, Wes had an eternity of that sorrow to look forward to. If only by clapping their hands loudly enough they really could bring back Tinkerbelle.

Despite everything he knew, Spike found himself hoping. It was a desperate, vain hope, but the fact it was there at all amazed him. His instincts rarely failed, and right now they said he was a fool for being here, for allowing himself to be involved in the charade at all. You couldn't blame Wesley for grasping at the proverbial. The blame lay with Angel and his, "We've been played." Why hadn't the big idiot tried to let Wes down gently?

Yet Spike had gone along with it, and now he could see why. Somewhere inside him William was crying out for the wrong to be put right: Fred back here, back with Wesley. Bloody Angel.

Soundproofing on the observation rooms was impressive; Spike could only hear muffled singing from where he was. He saw the duet through the window, though. Could even lip-read most of it. For a while Lorne swayed to his own embellishments, while Illyria stood with that reptile patience of hers, only her jaw moving. With a little respect (just a little bit), the song wound up.

Squatting on his haunches, Spike waited. Eventually the door opened, revealing Lorne looking back over his shoulder into the room. "Normally I don't go with the whole _in medias res_ thing? But that was diva, pure diva."

"I see." Illyria's voice. "You may now call me blueberry muffin."

The demon sounded cheerful. Hard to tell if it was false or not. "I can see that name in lights."

When Lorne stepped out into the corridor, the door closed itself behind him with a sound that was final. This was it.

"Well?" Spike said.

- - -

Hunched over the meeting table, Wesley shook uncontrollably. Angel and Gunn had apparently given up trying to simply talk him down. Gunn sat close beside him, while Angel paced, occasionally resting a hand on one of Wes's shoulders. Doubtless, this was intended to be comforting, and in a way it was. In another way, the feeling was claustrophobic and oppressive. One didn't have an easy approach to that kind of physical contact after thirty-six years of being male and English.

"Hey, man," Gunn said gently, "whatever happens, know that we're right here for you. We ain't gonna be leaving you again."

Even in the midst of his misery, Wes inwardly squirmed with embarrassment at this compassion, a sensation that magnified when Angel gave his shoulder another friendly squeeze. Both of them had been uttering similar words of support since Lorne and Spike left the room. They meant well, but nothing they said or did could help him. Lorne must be with Illyria now. Would she sing for him? If she did, the truth was probably known already. Fred was gone. Of course she was; he'd always known it, just as he'd always known she could never be with him. He'd been a fool to believe that, after everything, things would work out for them. It had been like a miracle, her kissing him that evening. And, like an inverted miracle, she had been cruelly torn from his arms and destroyed before his horror-struck eyes.

No form of spell could remove that memory etched onto his soul. For so long he'd watched her exquisite body and the workings of her brilliant, lateral, and charming mind. At the end he'd watched her slowly eaten alive from the inside out, slowly tortured to death, in agony, in terror. Then her beautiful and indomitable soul burnt away. It was wrong. It was obscene. It sullied the very idea that goodness existed…

…Yes, it _was_ wrong, wasn't it? In fact, perhaps it was so wrong that it couldn't really be true. An unexpected and certainly unlooked-for glimmer of hope appeared in the darkness where Wesley lived. Consumed might mean absorbed. Had he forgotten that already? Forgotten about the inadequate "evidence" of Sparrow's word? And what about the messages in Illyria's article? Apparently this had all been washed away by despair. Not the things themselves – their import. Even now it required intense mental effort to remember. A chill went through Wesley as he began to suspect his mind had been manipulated. He willed himself to hope.

But hope died the moment he heard the conference room door opening. Oh, God. How would he be able to bear this?

"You gotta be kidding me," Gunn said.

Wes stopped trembling, raised his head, and looked at the doorway. Spike and Lorne stood there, grinning like idiots. A whistling sound began as Wesley, brushing the hand from his shoulder, stood and walked toward them. Angel, of course, reached them first.

Something amazing must have happened, because Lorne unexpectedly gripped the vampire's upper arms, without a trace of the animosity he'd shown less than an hour ago. The demon actually beamed, and Angel smiled uncertainly in return. "You managed to get a reading from Illyria?"

"Loud – _very_ loud – and clear."

Angel smiled more widely. "And?"

"She's got soul," said Lorne.

The whistling increased in both volume and pitch. Everyone was celebrating all around Wes, clapping him on the back, laughing. "I'm terribly sorry," he said. "I think I'm about to faint." Someone, he thought it was Spike, caught him as his legs gave way. A dimmer switch faded his thoughts, and for a little while he rested.

- - -

Angel insisted Wes allow Medical to give him the once-over, so it wasn't until evening that, in a spirit of celebration, everyone relocated to the all-night diner just across the street (a favourite of Fred's). All five of them crammed into a single booth. Wesley read the journal article over and over. He was glowing, floating on air. The world, his friends, everything was immediate and wonderful, but he couldn't allow himself to bathe in these feelings. He'd already failed her with self-indulgent despair; he wasn't about to do the same thing by wallowing in joy. Fred was still here. She existed. Knowing that was a bliss surpassing anything he'd experienced or imagined. Now her soul had to be released. He swallowed with difficulty and looked up. "What do you mean she isn't Illyria?"

Leaning forward in his seat, Lorne said, "Don't glower at me like that."

"I'm not glowering." _I'm glowing_, Wes thought, fighting against a delirium of happiness.

"And finish your – what shall we call this? Breakfast?" Pushing a pink container across the table, the demon smacked his lips.

"I can't possibly eat an entire box of doughnuts." Wesley had to smile. Angel, presumably thinking of blood sugar, had ordered glazed jelly doughnuts for him. They were so sweet he could almost feel his teeth rotting as he ate one. He shoved the box away again, only for Gunn to slide it back.

"_Sure_ you can. They'll make you feel a whole lot better."

Everyone was in a silly mood. Exasperated, Wesley snatched up another pastry and took a bite. He could practically hear his teeth shriek in protest. "Satisfied? Now can we stop chattering about bloody doughnuts and get back to the matter at hand? Lorne? You said she isn't Illyria."

"She isn't."

Spike wrote on a napkin, smiling to himself. "She's nervy, easily spooked," he said distractedly. "Still seems like the same Blue to me, though."

"I didn't say she was different."

A scrunched-up napkin hit Lorne in the chest. Wes turned to look at the window seat and saw Angel with one hand extended, eyes glinting mischievously. "Enough riddles, Lorne."

Laughing a little, Lorne said, "That being we call Illyria? She isn't Illyria. She never has been. It took me a while to get a good reading."

"Oh?" said Spike. "I thought you were just having fun."

Lorne grinned. "There was that too, Spikelet."

"Did you just-"

"But mainly it was because there's two auras there, bound up together. It's not easy to tell them apart."

Gunn's tenor became level and questioning. His attorney voice. "So you're saying, what, Fred and Illyria are mixed with each other?"

"A hybrid." Wesley added. He'd expected this, but still felt his doughnut-filled stomach slowly turn over.

Head tilting in acknowledgement, Lorne raised one immaculately manicured finger. "I guess you could say that. Sort of IllyriFred. Illyria's driving, but Fred's giving advice from the passenger seat, and I think she's shouting it louder all the time. Sometimes the two auras are confused. That's the best I can explain it."

It was appalling, but it made sense. Illyria. Wesley thought carefully about every word and gesture of hers. He ate another excruciatingly sweet doughnut and reread the last set of equations from her (or was it Fred's?) article. All around him, delighted confusion passed between the others.

"Fred's been here under our noses the whole time." There was a bemused smile in Angel's words.

"Yeah," Gunn said. "Like when Illyria busted me out of suburban hell."

"Indeed." Wesley didn't look up. "She claimed she did it so we'd be in her debt."

"She ever call on that?" said Spike.

"No." Turning back a page, Wes began to reread again. Something about this particular formula was interesting, and strangely recognisable. "And don't you find it odd we so readily accepted that a genderless Old One, dating back eons before the development of sexual reproduction, was female?"

"That's just it," Lorne said. "Illyria may be genderless, but the bluebird's all woman." One side of his mouth curled. "Okay, half all woman. If you see what I mean."

Actually, Wesley could see. And he was starting to understand why it had taken him until now to realise it. He shifted his attention back to the journal. This calculation was tricky. "Illyria was god-king of the Primordium, Shaper of Things. Its rule was absolute, amoral, beyond good and evil. It was as far above us as we are above a cockroach. And what happens when this inconceivable deity is resurrected? It mysteriously doesn't kill anyone, and, upon finding its army destroyed, becomes a pompous little-girl-lost with an interest in Petri dishes." Illyria's display of emotions, her automatic bonding with him, her human behaviour, her apparent desire to _be_ Fred – all of this should have alerted him to at least the possibility that things were not as they seemed, and yet it had simply washed over him without his notice.

"Well, there was that time she killed or dusted most of us," Angel said hesitantly.

True. She'd been upset. "Earlier that day she told me betrayal was simply a word in her time, with no judgement attached to it. She admitted, however, that she was troubled by my attempt to restore Fred. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say she took it personally. What happened later was in part self-defence and in part a reaction to betrayal." Just as he had when first reading Illyria's article, Wesley felt a smile of recognition play on his lips. This time he allowed it to stay. "You say the auras are sometimes confused, Lorne. Who do we know with a passionate hatred for treachery above all other things?" Oh, wait. The calculation was actually rather simple. Yes. All one had to do was solve the bracketed section here, and this whole sequence would-

_The diner was gone. Wesley was in a forest of lush and impossibly green trees. Scents alien and also familiar filled his awareness, and somewhere there was singing- _

Angel looked at him, a little concerned. "Everything okay, Wes? You're not going to pass out on us again, are you?"

There were the walls of the diner, as solid as ever. It was like the transition between dream and wakefulness, but it was difficult to tell which was which. The forest had seemed real, equal to the reality around him now. At the exact moment his mind untangled the final series of equations, a world had burst into sense-shocking life. Blinking, screwing his eyes closed, Wesley inwardly swore to catch up on his sleep. He had to remain focused, for her. "I'm-I think I'm not quite myself, yet."

"Have another doughnut," Lorne said, dropping one onto Wesley's plate.

Grimacing, Wes looked at yet another lump of sugar masquerading as a bread product. He ate a piece of it anyway and smiled again. She existed. "You're receiving a commission from my dentist?"

Lorne grinned back at him. "It ain't from your image consultant, sweetie." The grin faded. "You know, you're right, and Angel's right. She was under our noses. How come we couldn't see her?" His question sobered the mood around the table. Each had his own story to tell of Fred's presence in Illyria's words and acts. Each berated himself for not picking up on it. Wesley worked his way through to the end of the article and listened to the others without comment. When he'd read the conclusion again, he closed the journal and lifted his head.

"That crap Sparrow fed me," Gunn said finally. "I just believed it."

Snorting softly, Spike dropped his pen. He folded and pocketed the napkin. "It was all a con trick."

"A cheap one," said Angel. "But if it was a cheap con, why did we fall for it?"

"Because one doesn't see the misdirection in a shell game." Everyone turned and stared at Wesley. He realised he'd raised his voice and forced his tone to become gentler. "All of us should have realised what was going on. I believe our thoughts were stage-managed by someone or something."

Several seconds of silence passed before Angel spoke, anger moulding his features. "Except that two days ago things changed, because Fred gave us the heads-up."

"All of a sudden we didn't look like sure marks anymore." One corner of Spike's mouth rose cheerlessly.

"And so whoever's running the game decided to activate the assassination squad," Wes finished, sharing a moment's understanding with the two vampires. "Quite."

Clasping his hands together, Lorne frowned. "So, who are we talking about here, the Powers?"

"Not their style," Angel said.

Gunn lapsed into his courtroom voice again. "And it doesn't fit the Senior Partners' _modus operandi_."

"We're on their side now, anyway." Angel's brow creased, apparently in perplexity at his own words.

"The First Evil, then," said Spike. After seeming to consider for a moment, he shook his head.

Wesley had already reached the same conclusions. There was no entity or group of entities that seemed quite right for this. Whatever was responsible must be potent enough to shape events and influence thoughts and actions, more so than anything involved in the plot to raise Jasmine. This was a new threat, perhaps more serious than any they'd faced. But it was trivial, obviously, beside the need to help Fred's soul escape from the strange cave in which it was trapped.

Angel pulled another napkin out of the dispenser, took Spike's pen, and wrote something. He handed it to Gunn.

"What's this?" Gunn said.

"The address of the Black Thorn's inner sanctum. I want you to pay a visit. There won't be a problem – the guards will know you. Go through the Circle's records. Find any references to their – to our – most serious enemies." A sad expression passed over Angel's face and he briefly looked out of the window before taking the napkin back and writing on it once more. "Look into this too, would you?" He passed the napkin to Gunn again.

The attorney read it, and his eyes widened for a moment. "I'm on it," he said.

More mysteries, even now? It didn't matter. Only one thing did. "Angel, I understand that discovering who did this to us is important, but we have to free her soul. That must be our priority."

"Agreed. How do we do it?"

The directness of the question halted Wesley in his tracks for an instant, but he quickly recovered. "I'm unsure. I think the answer is somewhere in here." He held up _Modern Physics Review_. "I'll need time to study this further and extend my research."

Standing, businesslike, Angel said, "Then that's your brief. Check Fred's notes. Look at whatever Illyria's been writing on the walls. Get help from the lab, if there's someone you can trust." He turned a determined glance on the demon and the other vampire. "Lorne, Spike, talk to Illyria, find something we can use. Be careful." They both nodded, but no one stirred. Angel's speech and body language took on an edge of authority. "Let's get to it, people. The night is young." Then he became a little sheepish. "Also, I'm kinda stuck in here until you move."

They rose and moved to leave, but by unspoken consent paused by the counter and formed a circle.

"For Winifred," Angel said. "This time, we get it right."


	6. Chapter Six

Angel took his seat in the conference room and inwardly smiled to see Wesley busily preparing, connecting a laptop and projector. The near-lethargic melancholy that had characterised Wes's movements was almost gone. It wouldn't have been a surprise if he'd worn glasses this morning. But no. That Wesley had been outgrown. This man would probably always have a whisper of the dark about him. Later in the day Gunn had his own presentation to give, but for now the floor belonged to Wes.

Lorne and Spike, who had been sharing a joke, quietened as the projector lit up and an image appeared on the screen facing it. There were several circles of different sizes, all with oddly frilled edges, forming a single shape. The largest circle looked like it was crushed at one end. As Wes pressed a key on the laptop, the image zoomed closer, and one of the tiny frills magnified until Angel saw it was an exact replica of the original image. A detail of this grew larger until it too was revealed to hold the same combination of circles. This repeated continuously, like a series of Russian dolls that went on forever, beautiful and unsettling.

"I've grasped the fundamentals of Illyria's article," Wesley said as he paced to and fro. "But they're rather abstract and difficult to explain, even in layman's terms. You'll have to take most of what I tell you on trust." He pointed to the screen. "First, some background. This is the Mandelbrot fractal set, order and chaos."

"Pretty," said Lorne. "Is there whale song and panpipes?"

A restrained smile appeared on Wes's face. "I hadn't considered that." The image on the screen changed to what looked like a satellite photograph of swirling clouds. "Complex systems may seem ordered, predictable, subject to fate, if you like. However, when we look at them more closely we can see wrinkles and irregularities in that order. Occasionally these cause predictability to break down. The most well-known example of this is the so-called butterfly effect."

From the corner of his eye, Angel saw Spike raise a hand. "A butterfly flaps its wings over the Pacific. That little breeze ends up as a hurricane over the Atlantic, or something." A little defensively, he added, "Saw it on the Discovery Channel."

Wesley's eyebrows rose the tiniest bit. "That's essentially correct. It was once believed that weather patterns were a system we could fully understand. In fact, tiny events can affect the whole in ways beyond our ability to predict. And so we come to quantum mechanics."

"We do?" Gunn was pensive, clutching his briefcase like a comfort blanket. He looked puzzled, but perhaps that was because his attention was somewhere else.

"I'm afraid so. The particular interpretation of quantum theory Fred leans toward is based on the idea that our minds in a sense create the world around us. They cause potential events to become actual events. At the level of subatomic particles, the tiniest things known to exist, reality itself is made from pure mathematical probability. Although we perceive matter, energy, space, and time, these are only methods we use to comprehend the universe; they are not how it actually is." Wesley rapped his knuckles on the table. "Though important, this is merely our version of reality. Beyond this, there is just mathematics."

His head spinning, Angel tried to comprehend what on earth that meant. Damn. He'd just been congratulating himself on how well he was following this. After furtively checking that everyone else wore a dazed frown, he said, "I'm not with you."

For a moment Wes glanced downward, his mind obviously ticking over. He raised his eyes and spoke haltingly. "Think of it this way. Unlike the reality we're familiar with, the quantum realm is one of mathematical ideals. It is perfect and unchanging. There, all probabilities co-exist. One of the things a subatomic particle can do, one possibility, is perceived by us and comes to pass. Our consciousness flattens out other potential outcomes and allows the event to become part of what makes up the solid reality we know. But outside of that reality the particle is still pure mathematics, a wave equation, containing all possibilities."

Spike leaned back in his chair and put his boots on the table. "That's what I was thinking. Glad you cleared that up."

"The point is that our thoughts create the ordered reality we know from an underlying chaos of mathematical interactions." It seemed that Wes wasn't encouraged by the looks he could see on their faces, because he threw his hands in the air before touching the laptop's keyboard. The clouds were replaced by an incomprehensible mess of symbols. "Illyria's paper goes much further than this." Wesley gestured at the bizarre math on the screen. "Take this set of equations. They seemed familiar to me, but I couldn't quite place them. On going through Fred's notes, I realised that she formulated these as part of her effort to re-corporealise Spike."

"Makes sense." Some of the confusion on Gunn's brow lifted. "Bodies and souls."

Nodding, Wesley reached for the laptop again. "Indeed. If I'm reading this hypothesis correctly, the soul's structure is composed of massless energy packets known as virtual particles." Now a paragraph appeared on the screen. "Listen to some of the accompanying text." Wes turned to the screen and read from it. "If we consider delta constant chaotic bifurcations in atomic energy states to be equal to the rate of compactification, then it is clear that the system becomes observer-dependent, with a set of variables determined by the observer."

"Is it because I'm not from this dimension that I didn't understand a single word of that?" Lorne looked around the table. "It isn't, is it?"

Glancing in the demon's direction, Wesley scowled softly. "Doubtful. I've devoted almost every waking hour to this for four days, and I only half comprehend it. It's hard to convey just how radical it is. What is implied here is choice and control transcending physical laws. The observer doesn't merely generate reality from possibilities. He or she decides on the course of events."

This struck a chord with Angel. Dim understanding began to form in his mind. "Standing outside the machine, responsible for your own choices?"

Wes pressed a key. "Screw destiny, yes." The equations returned. "This is a mathematical description of the soul." He paused for a few seconds, probably to give everyone the time to take that in. The next image on the screen showed lots of small spheres gathered around a larger one. "In this simplified diagram of an atom we can see how electrons, subatomic particles, orbit the nucleus at specific distances. The distance of an electron from the nucleus is determined by its energy state and is called a shell."

Gunn uttered a quiet, bitter laugh. "Heard that word a lot lately."

Answering this with a half smile, Wesley said, "That's probably not a coincidence." He gestured to the screen. "When the energy state of an electron changes, it abruptly moves from one shell to another, the famous quantum leap. Illyria proposes that this can be instigated by the mind of an observer." Now a picture of lines – short, looped, and split – came into view. "Another way to think of particles is as strings. This is actually complimentary – superstring theory combines with quantum mechanics by a process called perturbation. Illyria's article, which builds on Fred's earlier work, suggests that strings may be compacted into higher spatial dimensions. These dimensions are themselves curved into such a tiny space that they exist within atomic shells."

"Dimensions like Pylea?" Lorne asked.

"Not exactly, though they are places, in the sense that they're made up of space-time." Wesley seemed about to go on, then he sighed resignedly. "What is new and remarkable here is that an observer causes this compactification to happen, intentionally. You may recall Fred operated on the assumption that Spike's non-corporeal essence straddled a dimensional void. I believe that, at the end, Fred concealed herself within the atomic shells of Illyria, inter-dimensionally. It's an almost exact reversal of a re-corporealisation technique she invented last year."

Okay. Angel was beginning to feel he had a vague grasp of the idea. But that re-corporealisation stuff needed equipment and other things. "I hear what you're saying, but I don't see how she managed this."

Passing a hand over his brow, Wes sat on the edge of the table. "Illyria's resurrection process meant that vast quantities of mystical energy were present. And Fred's strong, Angel. Stronger than the rest of us put together. Without her we were rudderless. We very nearly self-destructed. Her knowledge, her discoveries, her experience as a survivor, her strength of will – they provided an escape route."

Stronger than all of them? Fred was tough, sure, but that was overstating things. And it didn't explain this, anyway. "But how did she do it?"

"She used her mind to shape her reality."

There was a moment of silence. He didn't really mean that, did he?

"You're saying she just _thought_ her way out of it?" Spike said.

His voice calm, Wesley stared at the other vampire. "Why not? Why shouldn't a sequence of thoughts have power? A spell alters reality by the mere intonation of words. At least, it seems to. The spiritual intent behind those words is what truly drives it."

Angel's sense of understanding suddenly became more solid. _Not words,_ he thought. _Consonant representations of a mathematical transfiguration formula_. "She can get free the same way?"

Still calm, Wes shook his head. "Not without help."

Just before the door opened, Angel smelt her.

"You must all concentrate your wills," Illyria said, striding into the room. "A source and focus of energy is also needed."

Unbelievably, Spike grinned. "You're late."

Folding herself into the chair opposite Angel's, she barely acknowledged any of them. "My movements are not yours to dictate. Nor am I a willing slave to timepieces."

Angel looked at her; she stared back impassively. He looked at Spike, somehow resisting the urge to push him out of the window for a nice suntan. Wonderful. This was just wonderful. "You invited her here? Today? After I told you to be careful?"

"It's okay, angel cakes," Lorne said.

Wesley climbed off the table and took a chair himself. "Don't be concerned. Illyria and I have reached an understanding. She's offering us her assistance."

Her face turning in Wes's direction, Illyria spoke with unusual gentleness. "I am allowing _you_ to assist _me_."

He said nothing in return, but inclined his head.

Angel glared around the table. Was he imagining things, or was there faint amusement? "Am I the only one who didn't know about this? Gunn?"

Shrugging, Gunn patted his briefcase. "Don't look at me, man. Been up to my ears in evil's memoirs since Thursday." He didn't actually say no.

Fine. Great teamwork. Looking at her again, Angel was as always struck by how otherworldly she was. Her head suddenly cocked. Fred might be in there but, like Spike said, she was still the same Illyria. The cold, unreadable blue of her eyes unnerved him. With an effort he held her gaze and leaned forward, confrontational. "Why would you want to help?"

She glowered silently.

"Let us help you, whatever. What do you get out of this?"

Her voice remained soft and liquid, but now a trace of sadness came into it. "True leaders are untroubled by their mistakes. Nevertheless, they acknowledge them. I underestimated the shell. I do not belong in this world. When she is restored I will return to a sleep that should never have been broken, until the latter days when the Old Ones walk the Earth once more."

Wesley nodded slowly in response to Angel's questioning look.

She sounded genuine. There was something very earnest and weary about her words. It was the sort of voice people had when they felt they'd outlived their usefulness. A brief twinge of sympathy passed through Angel. "You said something about an energy source and focus."

"Yes."

If it was anything like what had been needed to re-corporealise Spike, that wouldn't be easy to find. Gladly moving his eyes away from hers, Angel turned to Gunn. "Might the Senior Partners-"

The attorney stared steadily back at him. "Not a chance."

Dismissively, Illyria said, "You have no need of the Wolf, Ram, and Hart. Some of my power has been here all through the ages of my slumber. My sacraments can bestow this on you."

Spike held out his hand.

She glanced at it and then at his face. "They are within the shell of my Qwa'ha Xahn."

"Qwa'ha what?" said Lorne.

Something a lot like hatred flitted briefly on her features. "The maggot called Knox. They are in his body."

Jumping a little, Wesley drew a breath. His expression became momentarily dead and unrepentant. "What was done with it?"

"Buried in the Wolfram & Hart corporate cemetery, as per his contract." Gunn spoke as if he was describing the man's pension.

The W & H cemetery was just over an hour's drive away. "Then we go get these sacraments." That part, at least, was simple.

"There is a difficulty," Illyria said. "Only the Qwa'ha Xahn may touch and move them. They and he are linked."

Spike sneered good-naturedly. "Don't be so picky, Blue." When she said nothing, he laughed. "Come on. What's the worst that could happen if one of us fetched them?"

Her look might have frozen an ocean. "You do not wish to know."

Angel believed her, but perhaps there was a way around this. Like Lilah, Knox was bound to the firm even in death. "As CEO could I call on the perpetuity clause in Knox's contract, get him back here on sabbatical?"

"No," said Gunn. "But as head of the Black Thorn, you can." He produced a pen and made some notes. "I'll prepare the paperwork."

Now things were being set in motion, Angel felt uncertain. "If this works, Wes, what will happen?"

His eyes bright, Wesley faced him. "I thought that was clear. Illyria's essence will return to its sarcophagus and Fred will re-corporealise."

Spike looked up. "Her body, too?"

"Of course." Some of Wes's reclaimed vitality drained away. "If this works."

Conversation stopped. It seemed like this part of the day was at an end. Angel shifted his gaze over them. Spike, Lorne, Illyria, Wesley, Gunn. He sensed a connection between them and himself. The Circle of the Black Thorn was in session.

"Is there something you wanted to say, Angel?" Wes asked.

No. Not now. "We'll break for lunch. Meet back here in thirty."

- - -

The boss had something on his mind. He'd never handed out a lunch invitation before. Being CEO had its perks. You got a nice big office, everyone at your beck and call, and some bit of hot stuff called a PA. The girl – what was her name? Wanda? – placed two large cups of blood on Angel's desk. Spike watched her sashay out of the office, carefully noting the movement of her buttocks and swing of her hips.

"I was just checking her out-" Angel began.

Spike leered. "Me, too."

"-to see if she's a robot."

Bollocks. "Yeah. Me, too. So, erm, you always come in here for a bite to eat?"

Looking hungrily at the blood, Angel sighed, "I don't want to put the others off their food."

A bit shy with the old liquid lunch? Spike's senses homed in on it. The cup's contents were warm, fragrant, and inviting. Blood, blood, glorious blood. Nothing quite like it. "That's not true, is it?"

Angel grimaced slightly. "No. The truth is that I don't want them to see I'm enjoying mine."

Raising his cup, Spike tilted it slightly as a toast. "Cheers."

The grimace became a smirk. "Sláinte."

_No need to be polite_, Spike thought. _It's just us vamps_. Blood. It wasn't the good human stuff, but it did the job. In a single draft he drank it all, savouring the tangy and electrifying liquid.

Both vampires slammed their cups onto the desk with heartfelt and vocal sighs.

"God, that's good." Angel had vamped out.

"It hits a spot, alright," Spike agreed. His face was different, too – he'd let a little of the demon out to play. "Not like the real thing, though."

"We don't think about that." His eyes closed, Angel smiled a bloody, fang-toothed smile.

"Well, _I_ don't."

"Glad to hear it. Me neither."

"Ever." After a while Spike felt himself put the game face away.

Angel did the same and started to look thoughtful. As close as he ever got to looking thoughtful, anyway. "What do you think?"

"The pig's blood? There's a funny aftertaste."

"No, I mean about what we just heard."

So that's what this was about. Spike suddenly understood exactly what Angel was thinking, and why there were in this office. Old boys like them had a special perspective on the world. Maybe a bit jaded, a bit bitter. But it was usually right. Didn't look like Angel wanted to come right out and say anything. Surprising himself, Spike took pity and decided to do the doomsayer bit for him. "Wes thinks he can make Blue a real girl again."

"It looks that way." Then Angel seemed to notice the expression that Spike had allowed himself to show. "What?"

_You know what_. In different circumstances it would have been fun to bait the other vampire. "I can't see it. It's still hard to believe Fred isn't all burnt up. Think we spent our luck already. Don't you feel that?" Fred and Wes making it to the last stanza? Pipedreams. There was something else, too. The other re-corporealisation ideas she'd come up with were dangerous. Fred had said it herself. Best mention that to Wes.

"I'm learning not to trust my feelings. Are you sure yours aren't being got at?"

"This is different." Spike thought about exactly what he meant. "We've been around a long time, seen a lot, you more than me. Is that what you wanted me to say?" Speaking more gently, he motioned toward the apocalyptic city outside. "There are no happy endings, Angel. We both know it."

Angel looked at him, and then rose and walked to the windows. His hands on the glass, he stood hunched for a few moments before turning back. When he did, something on his face had altered. "Sometimes there have to be," he said.

- - -

There were no preliminaries from Gunn, no asides or pictures. He pressed his palms on the table and gazed down at them all. Even though nothing was said for a time, it felt to Angel like the attorney was cross-examining each of them. Eventually, Gunn began to speak in measured and unemotional tones. "Eight years ago the Black Thorn's seers noticed key events happening that had never been prophesied. They got the idea fate was being messed with."

"Eight years ago." Speaking fondly, Lorne gestured to the room with his eyes. "That was when I came to this dimension." He smiled dreamily. "Ah, I remember that balmy May like yesterday."

Casting a sharp glance at him, Wesley said, "What was the date?"

"Hmmm. I think it was … the seventh?"

Illyria somehow sat straighter than she had a moment before. "The same day the shell went missing from the Stewart Brunell Public Library."

An uncomfortable sensation made Angel withdraw into himself. Eight years ago. He'd met Whistler, and Buffy had been called as the Slayer. A few months later, she'd arrived in Sunnydale. May 7th two years ago was the day Tara was shot. The year after that, on May 7th, he'd had his friends' memories altered and taken over a certain law firm.

"Right." After pulling some pages from among his notes, Gunn continued as if he'd read Angel's thoughts. "You're getting the picture. Forget about coincidence. Something's been playing us, and it ain't the Powers or anything else we know."

Lifting his head up from whatever he was writing, Spike said, "That's old news. A demon by the name of Skip was plotting, so I hear."

"It was more subplot than plot. Skip, Jasmine – just a couple of other pieces on the board." Gunn flipped through the pages he'd chosen. "The Black Thorn had people constantly looking at events, how they played out, how they connected. You should see it. Everything falling like dominoes." The pages dropped from his hand onto the table. "We haven't always been captains of our ships."

That made perfect sense to Angel. Hadn't he thought, on the night they'd fought the Senior Partners' army, that his decisions were coming from somewhere external to himself? Hadn't all of them been second guessing themselves ever since? "This something that played us – what kind of something are we talking about here?"

"I don't know. The Black Thorn's people figured it was a group, some powerful gods of fate. All I can say is that the Circle and them weren't buddies."

"The Black Thorn's enemy," Lorne said, musing. "That makes them good guys, right?"

The attorney's voice was tired. "Wrong. Sometimes they fool with the Senior Partners' plans; other times they help them along." He pulled out a chair and slumped into it. "I don't have much. I know they want some of us to turn bad. They've been moving the vampire with a soul toward a pivotal place in the apocalypse."

CEO of the Wolfram & Hart LA branch, leading the Circle of the Black Thorn. To all intents and purposes, Angel was in charge of the apocalypse. It didn't get any more pivotal. "Okay. Me." He aimed a brief and belligerent stare at Spike. "Who else?"

"Wes." Gunn's eyes turned on the man. "You've been getting pushed into the dark ever since you were Faith's Watcher, maybe even before then. But they didn't really get to you until Billy Blim."

There was some surprise on Wes's face, but it quickly faded. His brow creased, doubtful. "I was infected with demon blood through what was ultimately my own carelessness. The odds against that being somehow arranged must be vast."

Letting out an acidic laugh, Gunn gripped each side of the zipper on his top, as if he was in court and holding the lapels of a suit jacket. He probably wasn't aware of it. "You think? Then try this: how did Billy get free from hell in the first place?"

"You know that already," Angel said. "I had to break him out as a favour to Wolfram & Hart. It was the only way to help Cordy. I understood there'd be consequences…" He trailed off, knowing what Gunn was going to say.

"Remember who was guarding Billy?"

Skip. Skip was Billy's guard. It was the first time Angel met the demon, and he'd felt bad that the two of them had to go into combat. What seemed like decades later, though it was actually nineteen months, Angel learnt he'd been allowed to win that fight. "It was Skip," he said. His voice sounded oddly quiet in his own ears. "Skip let me take Billy."

"He obviously wanted the sick bastard released from hell." Wesley seemed suddenly more persuaded. Resentment cast a shadow on his face. "I imagine it wouldn't take much to ensure I was exposed. They could have implanted the certainty in my mind that the infection was mystical rather than physical, for example. Had I thought otherwise, I would have proceeded more carefully. My God."

With a sombre expression, Gunn placed the pages in a column down the table. Each one had some details of their lives written on it. "An example," he said. He stopped, screwed his eyes closed, and opened them again. "Billy throws a wrench in the works. After the ballet, Wes is left alone and ripe for the picking. Connor is taken and comes back old enough to father a child. Jasmine rises. We put her down, and then we're offered Wolfram & Hart." His gaze met Angel's with no judgement. "You had to accept because of Connor. Cordy dies and Illyria happens. The records stop there, but I can fill in the blanks." A final paper was brought out and added to the column of pages. "Angel goes Michael Corleone; Wes is killed; we're left in an alley to be sliced up into champion pastrami. Everything just like dominoes."

He'd skimmed over the most painful incidents, but they were written down for everyone to see. Drawn to one section, Angel noticed Gunn had appended a note. It stated that the decision to take out the Circle of the Black Thorn had stemmed directly from Fred's apparent death.

Spike picked up a page and read aloud from it. "At the Deeper Well, Spike convinces Angel to allow Illyria's resurrection." With a disgusted snort, he threw the paper across the room. "Nice to see I've been doing my bit for Team Puppet."

"And Fred?" Lorne said gently.

For an instant Gunn stared at him. Then he laughed under his breath. "She's been a fly in their ointment from the get-go."

"A butterfly." Illyria spoke matter-of-factly.

Her sudden contribution silenced Gunn. After a few seconds, he carried on. "The seers were certain Fred was brought to LA so that Wes would be turned. It didn't work, because she wouldn't play ball, no matter what happened. Every time she was supposed to shove him out into the cold, she wound up bringing him back in."

A rush of affection filled Angel's dead heart. Fred wouldn't walk the path she'd been given. Of course not. She and destiny weren't the best of friends. "What about Illyria?"

"Illyria's a wild card, too. Her coming was a big surprise to everyone: the Circle, the Senior Partners. At first they were worried. They thought she might be the start of these fate honchos moving against them. She didn't turn out the way they figured she would."

Illyria hadn't even turned out the way Illyria thought she would. Angel looked at her, looked for Fred.

If it hadn't been for the hollow quality of Gunn's delivery, he would have sounded like he was summing up. "Then they guessed Illyria was just here as the nuclear option to send Wes to the dark side. Fred gone, her soul destroyed, he'd lose it for sure. The Black Thorn were banking on that. After all the effort that had gone into changing Wes, they were positive he'd be a big asset for them. See, whenever they can, the Senior Partners make use of what these other guys do." He motioned to Angel with his open hand. "They've had their sights on you since you came to LA. At least since you came to LA."

Unmoved, Illyria haughtily lifted her chin. "My role in this is a chance overlap. The return of Illyria, god-king, was foretold many eons ago."

How deflated Gunn seemed. "I'm not sure you're getting this."

"They can backdate the changes they make." This came as a statement from Wesley. He certainly appeared to get it.

"They can _do_ anything." Gunn turned to Angel. "It's like what you told us about Buffy's sister."

One time, Angel had visited a sixteen-year old Buffy in the night and had to hide in a closet when Dawn entered the room. He would have sworn that actually happened. The past life Vail had given Connor was similar. This was nothing more than those things writ large. "You've touched on who, what, where, and when. How about why?"

"Why do they do it? Maybe just because they can, because they get off on yanking our chains."

Lorne stared despondently at the table's surface. "Or pulling our strings."

"So we cut the strings. Right now." Spike's face and voice were set, but they rapidly weakened. "They could have made me say that. Hell."

"I don't think so. The way things look to me, we should never have made it out of that alley." Glancing momentarily at Illyria, Gunn snapped the clasps on his case shut. "Something upset their game that night. The pattern since then has been different. If I had to lay out my stall in a courtroom, I'd say we've had them playing catch-up ever since."

There was a resolute glint in Wes's eyes. "At any rate, we have to proceed as if that is the case."

He was right. They couldn't go around questioning everything they said or did. There was a job to do. "You'll keep working through the math?" Wes nodded, and Angel moved his attention to Illyria. "About these sacraments of yours…"

"Summon the Qwa'ha Xahn tomorrow. I will be here." In a single, fluid, vertical motion, she stood and turned toward the door.

"Where are you going?"

"I have something to attend to. It does not concern you."

Angel watched her go. He still found it difficult to trust her, but it seemed he had no choice.


	7. Chapter Seven

"I'm flattered and, really, I'm intimidated. But come on guys, you're dealing with a damned soul here." A pause and a sickening smirk. "I'm not saying your good cop, bad cop thing is lame, but you have to admit it's hard to compete with the sufferings of Hades. Do your worst. I'm not saying anything!" The speaker laughed.

"We don't want you to talk, Knox. In fact, stop talking." Angel was tensed, as enraged as Spike had ever seen him. His fists clenched.

Knox. The weasel beamed at them, all little boy and cute-as-you-like. Spike had already thought of several inventive ways to wipe that smile away. He wished there weren't bars separating them. For someone who'd been taken from hell's torments, Knox wasn't too grateful or cooperative. No way was _he_ going to be getting these Duracells of Blue's. But then, she hadn't arrived yet to ask him nicely.

"Hey, I aim to please." Smiler made a zipping motion across his lips. Bastard.

Trying to maintain a cold expression, Spike stepped outside, dragging Angel with him. In the corridor he allowed his attempt at a sinister sneer to slip. Hopeless. They weren't going to get any anywhere like this. A good job they had an ace. Or a queen. Or a king. Spike shrugged, dismissing the fruitless encounter. "He'll soon change his tune when Blue gets here."

Angel's fists relaxed a little. Just a little. "What makes you say that?" There was an atmosphere of violence and stillness in the air. An echo of the old days.

"He's her Kwa Ha what's-it. He worships her."

"Qwa'ha Xahn. Qwa'ha. Wes said it was sort of a glottal stop." Angel gazed at the corridor's exit, eager to get away by the looks of it. Could be he was feeling the demon inside growing restless. "Knox wouldn't want to see Illyria put back in her box. He sacrificed everything to get her, it, out of the Well." His brow lowering, Angel glanced to one side. "And we were doing good cop, bad cop?"

"Well, yeah. I thought you knew."

"I'm the bad cop, right?"

"_I'm_ the bad cop." As bad as they come. "You know, this would have been much easier back in the day. Nina in LA yet?"

Surprise showed itself on the other vampire's face. "Last week. Why?"

"She's almost due for her monthlies. We could make Knox and her cellmates." Spike felt himself grin, not-too-soulfully. "Just a thought."

The boss gave him a look that was hard to read. "We can't torture him, Spike. It's not even an emergency."

Torture? It was all relative. Not much of a leap from harsh language to the thumbscrews. "No torture. Just put the fear of God into him. Give me a few minutes."

Now Angel smiled, not very differently from the way Angelus used to. "I'll be in my office if you need me." And off he went, hands washed clean.

Fair enough. Spike opened the door and went back into the cells. "Just you and me, then," he told Knox. "Nice and cosy." Leaning back against the wall, he folded his arms and tried to match the man's repugnantly cheerful expression. "Up the close and down the stair."

Knox's eyes twinkled boyishly. "Huh?"

"In the house with Burke and Hare."

Amazed laughter from Smiler now. Self-consciously amazed laughter. "What does _that_ mean? Are you trying to scare me?" He shook his head and wagged a finger. "Uh uh. I know all about you, Spike."

"Do you, now?"

The happy mask slipped a bit, showed up some of the rottenness beneath. "Yes. I do. You're a soul man. You won't hurt a human. Really? It's pathetic." He opened his mouth to say something else, but stopped when the bad cop produced an object from his duster. Spike dropped this item. It hit the floor with a dull, metallic bang.

"First of all, Knox, you aren't human. Don't flatter yourself." Spike removed another object and let it fall. The sound stabbed through the small room. "Second, you're dead, anyway. I'm thinking that makes you fair game." A final object joined the others on the ground. "Third…" What was third? After a moment's consideration, he said simply, "You're a wanker."

For the first time, Knox looked scared. All that talk of the sufferings of Hades must be a bluff. He was probably on the fast track down there, playing with brimstone in his chemistry set. "What are those?"

"Looks like you don't know me all that well." The railroad spikes were brutally real in the half-light of the cells. Smiler wasn't smiling now. Even for a dead man, he looked pale. This was going to be easier than Spike had thought. It felt good to see so much fear, to know he was the cause. Wait a minute, why was Knox looking at something to the left? Spike span around, amazed he hadn't heard the door open or close.

"Hi, Knoxy," Illyria said. She didn't look like Illyria. Brown hair and eyes, peaches and cream skin, glasses, lab coat – every inch the nerdy science girl. If Wes was here he would have been panting. Grinning, quirky, she took a step forward, not quite impulsive. Blue had really got good at this. You had to wonder just how much of it was an act. That was the question these days, wasn't it?

"I trusted you, Knox. I thought you were nice."

Knox gaped at her.

"It was slow and it hurt. It hurt so much." The grin fell and, almost violently, her appearance changed to blue and black. A dawning look of relief on Knox's face vanished as Illyria wrenched the cell door out of its frame and grabbed him by the throat. "You condemned me to live in this shell, diminished, in _this_ place."

He started to splutter. "Hey! Sorry!"

"Wesley has been in agony. It is your doing." Her grip tightened.

There was some bafflement in Knox's eyes. He probably wondered why she cared what Wes was feeling. But he didn't say anything. Couldn't, not with that much pressure on his windpipe.

It might be an idea to cool this down. Spike laughed, a little nervously. "Look, love-"

Her face darted in his direction, eyes like frozen suns. "I do not want your cocoa." Maybe that should have been funny, but it wasn't. Weird talk of hot beverages aside, she was frightening now. Really frightening. Turning back to Knox, she relaxed her fingers slightly. "You will retrieve my sacraments, Qwa'ha Xahn."

After sucking in a breath, Knox started spluttering again. "No! That's what they want. The vampires, the humans, the demon. They'll use the sacraments against you."

"They are my allies." A horrible gentleness crept into her tone. "For now I confer mercy, but if you presume to debate with me I will see to it that you pay for what you have done. In full. Your screams will be panicked birds taking wing in the dark forest of your anguish. I will shape a misery for you that knows no limitations. I will-"

The theme music to _The Simpsons_ drifted across the room.

Illyria and Knox stared at Spike. He closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and finger, and then reached into a pocket for his cell phone. That ring tone had to go. The phone's screen had the words "FOREHEAD BOY" on it.

Spike punched a button to receive the call and brought the phone to his mouth. "Guess what? I'm in the middle of something."

"Quiet," Angel hissed.

That sounded bad. Hushing himself to a level that even Blue might have trouble hearing, Spike said as casually as he could, "Alright."

Angel's voice was urgent. "Illyria."

She still stared, still with one hand around Knox's throat. Spike turned his back on her. "She's here. You want me to put her on?"

The other vampire groaned softly. "I'm coming down there. Keep her the hell away from Knox."

Risking a quick glance over his shoulder – Knox was being half-throttled – Spike tried to sound innocent. "Why?"

Corridor chatter formed a background of noise on the phone. Angel must be moving through the building. "I just got a call from the mind-enhancement clinic. According to the security cameras, Illyria was there all last night. It looks like she killed Sparrow."

"Looks like?"

"No one's been able to ID what she left behind."

Hell. A psycho god on the loose. That was nice news for a Wednesday evening. After what he'd seen her do, it was no surprise to Spike that she could reduce a human body to jam. Even so… "Teeth? Fingerprints?"

The door opened, and Angel rushed into the room, pocketing his phone. "There's just a mess. Let him go." He aimed this latter comment at Illyria.

"I will not." She was as serene as a breeze.

After entering the cell, Angel brought his face to within a few inches of hers. Pushing his luck. "Let him go and back off."

Had Spike thought she was scary? She bared her teeth – _now_ she was scary. It seemed like she was going to have it out with Angel right there. But then something inside her gained control. Her fingers slipped from Knox and she became tranquil again. "I would not harm him, not when he is of use to me."

A mocking expression formed on Angel's features. "Is that why you murdered Sparrow, because he wasn't of use?"

Unfazed, she gestured to something. It might have been the room, the world, or the universe. "I brought about what had to be. The slaughter of monsters is your business, is it not?"

"Yes, but…" A patient sigh from Angel. "We've been through this. A human can be redeemed. I'd be the first to admit Sparrow was slime, but he was human."

Illyria did that almost smile of hers. "It degrades humanity to label him such. Angel, would you also call the deadly ice life-giving water?"

Not bad. That was worth writing down.

"Wait," said Knox. "You killed Sparrow?"

"Shut up, Knox." Angel seemed affected by Illyria's words. Maybe he was just surprised she'd used his name. His eyes locked with hers, searching. "Who am I really talking to, here?"

Apparently losing interest, Illyria looked at Knox again. "Wrong, right – this morality does not apply. There is only necessity. Serve me, Qwa'ha Xahn. We are journeying to the repository of your shell." She gripped his arm and led him from the room.

Staring after them, Angel frowned slightly. He looked more pensive than angry, and he'd definitely had the self-righteousness knocked out of him. The latest crisis was over, apparently. A few seconds passed and then he motioned toward Illyria's and Knox's retreating backs. "Go with them."

Rolling his eyes in resignation, Spike followed the Old One and her priest. Nursemaid duty again.

- - -

4.6692016091029906718532038…

Papers were strewn around Fred's apartment, an outward sign of Wesley's perplexity. One number, the value of the quantity δ, appeared frequently in Illyria's article. It was pivotal in many equations and was the "delta constant" so often referred to in the accompanying text. After calculating it to twenty-five decimal places, Wes had stopped. Quite probably the number was transcendental, and the places extended to infinity.

Wesley put down the page he'd been reading and made yet another circuit of the apartment. Among the framed pictures on the walls were some of Fred's favourite equations, also framed. She'd told him she liked to see them because they were certain and ordered. They even brought chaos under their control.

In the article, δ played an important role in the bifurcation – the dividing into two halves – of atomic energy states. What that exact role was, however, was difficult to determine. The ideas presented were so far-reaching that Wes had problems grasping them for long enough to reach a final understanding. Whenever the eureka moment began, it ran away from his comprehension once more. The article was a mongrel born of different, and sometimes competing, models. It contained various interpretations of quantum mechanics, chaos, superstrings, supergravity, and supersymmetry.

"Give me a clue, Fred," Wesley whispered. In desperation he went to the personal effects from her office at Wolfram & Hart. Perhaps there was a note scrawled somewhere on a post-it, a writing pad, the Dixie Chicks poster, anything. Squatting, opening the box containing her things, he was immediately overwhelmed with emotion. He allowed himself a moment to experience it. His fingers moved lovingly over her glasses, and he wondered if he would see her wearing them soon. They were the only things that had gone to Pylea and back with her. He examined them. No scratches or marks.

Her toy rabbit wore glasses of its own; this for some reason made Wes pick it up. He smiled, playing with the floppy ears. It was a handsome little chap. As Wesley turned it over in his hands, he caught a trace of Fred's perfume and involuntarily brought the toy closer to his face. That was when he noticed some letters, almost faded away, on a label sticking out from the rabbit's leg. The handwriting was unformed and lacked the character it would later take on – a child's writing – but it was unmistakably Fred's. "Feigenbaum," it said.

That was the name she'd called out in her pain and fear. So it was this, obviously a cherished childhood toy, that she'd desperately needed. It might have comforted her, as his reading from _A Little Princess_ had done. Wes put the rabbit down. Standing, he took several slow, deep breaths before he moved to a corner of the room. There was, perhaps, one more thing he could try.

While the PC booted, Wesley sat and considered his dwindling options. He'd already checked every file on Fred's hard drive, and nothing new had turned up. There was just the internet left. After going online, he typed the first six digits of δ into Google and pressed Enter, expecting nothing. There were three hundred and forty-two hits. He straightened, scanning the summaries of the first ten results. Feigenbaum was mentioned five times. Sliding forward so suddenly he almost fell from his chair, Wesley opened another two browser windows and began to investigate more seriously, cross-referencing Boolean search terms. A few minutes later, he knew Feigenbaum's life story. He even had his email address.

Mitchell Feigenbaum was a professor at the Rockefeller University. He was known as a mathematician, primarily a chaos theoretician, but he personally saw no distinction between mathematics and physics, as if the science of the abstract and the science of the physical were one and the same. Although Feigenbaum considered chaos to be erratic and unpredictable, he posited chaotic motion as lying within an intricate subspace, known as a complex set or strange attractor, where its various possibilities were limited and its true nature hidden. The only way such systems could be studied was through methods of observation that built up complex details. Fractals, in other words.

Opening a source book, Wes said, "All published works by Mitchell Feigenbaum, with references to bifurcation and the delta constant highlighted, annotated to include commentary by secondary sources." He began to speed-read.

The delta constant had first appeared in print in 1979. Fred would have been four or five years old. Transcendental and also known as the Feigenbaum constant and the Feigenbaum number, it was the ratio between successive bifurcations in the Mandelbrot fractal set. But it had taken on more significance than this. Some careful searching of the annotations revealed that the constant had been used in equations describing the transition of electrons from one atomic shell to another. So the constant could be a sort of bridge between deterministic chaos theory and non-deterministic quantum mechanics.

The mists weren't parted so much as blown aside by a gale of knowledge. In Wesley's mind, the seemingly disparate elements of Illyria's article slotted laterally together into a shape that was both logical and sublime. Perhaps this was why he'd sensed Fred's presence in it all along; one had to think like her to understand it. Wes now realised that the entire paper was a single, elegant calculation. Energised, he started making sense of its sequences.

_Trees. Trees and singing._

He blinked. No. This had to be solved in a specific way, and he couldn't do it alone. Rising and going to the telephone, Wesley lifted the receiver and punched a button. "Yes, Angel, it's me," he said. "I know what we have to do."

- - -

A vampire crept among the tombstones, as intangible as smoke. Most wouldn't know it was there, not until it was upon them. Spike had smelt it a mile off, reeking of death and its last feed – a leech's smell. Dirty bugger. Personal hygiene didn't cost much.

It approached a nearby mausoleum and reached for the door handle. Then it stopped and faced them. "Hi."

"Evening," Spike said.

The vamp looked the mausoleum up and down, shaking its head. "The rents in this town are criminal, just criminal."

"Tell me about it," Knox began jovially. "My old condo-" Illyria's gaze silenced him.

"Resume digging," she said.

The vampire smiled dryly, glancing from one to the other. "You're up and about late."

No doubt about that. Morning was in the air, in the first hints of moisture on every blade of grass. "No rest for the wicked, as they say."

"True," the vamp laughed. "See you at work, then."

"See you, Vic." Waving a hand, Spike watched Vic enter the mausoleum and close the door. He should really get a place with a shower.

Knox, meanwhile, was making a meal out of grave digging. He had it all wrong, lifting a clod here, another there. Sniffing the air, calculating exactly how long it was to sunrise, Spike began to suspect the man was stalling for time. Either that, or he'd never had a spade in his hand before. A bit of friendly advice, then. "Not like that. Dig a trench at one end and widen it. And use that shovel to clear out the spoil."

Turning, Knox held out the spade. His _bonhomie _had momentarily left the building. "You want to do it? Just so you know, we're digging down, not up."

Spike moved to snatch the spade from him, but was knocked out of the way as Illyria pushed both of them aside.

She exhaled impatiently. "I weary of this." Dropping to the ground, she attacked the grave with her hands, scooping out double armfuls of earth. Soon she was at the bottom of a sizable hole. Blue didn't bother digging through the last foot and a half; she just sank her arm into the ground and pulled a coffin out. Something inside it thumped against the lid as it was thrown from the grave. After climbing from the hole, she stabbed her fingers into the coffin's side and tore the lid off, spraying a few splinters around. Tentatively, Knox moved beside her and glanced into the box. Spike stood at her other side.

It had been months since Knox's death, and so he was a bit the worse for wear. Skin shrivelled and yellowed, teeth exposed and grinning, eyes gone. That was probably what looked nastiest to the other, upright, Knox. Robbing his own grave; that went a long way beyond irony. Poor bloke.

But Knox only hesitated an instant when Blue told him to get the sacraments, and was soon squatting and fumbling inside the shirt his cadaver wore. After a bit of cursing, he rose to his feet. He held half a dozen crystals, like the ones on Illyria's sarcophagus. Spike saw her eyes narrow in concentration. Her head cocked twice. A milky light in six different colours grew from the crystals in Knox's hand. It was a magical luminosity shinning there inside them, and yet it looked completely normal and a part of the world. With a shout, Knox dropped the sacraments.

Illyria lowered her eyes to where they lay and then raised her head to stare impassively at him.

"Sorry," he said. "I've never felt their power before." Then he gasped. "My king…" He laughed disbelievingly. "You're _bleeding_."

It was true. She'd yanked the coffin lid off so aggressively that a splinter of it was sticking into her cheek. Her hand brushed the splinter away. Holding the hand in front of her, she looked at the blood there. "Yes, Knoxy. If you prick us, do we not bleed?"

Faster than it was possible to see, her arm shot forward, fingers smashing into Knox's chest up to the knuckles. She was going to rip him in two. And her face – it had gone from frightening to bloody terrifying, gruesome. That answered a question, anyway. Illyria must be the only one pulling the levers at the moment. Fred would never be a party to this. Would she?

Before Spike could react, however, Blue had calmly removed her hand and now used it to point at the fallen crystals. "Pick them up."

A bleak, not shocked, expression on his face, Knox stooped and did as he was told.

"Now place them, Qwa'ha Xahn. Place them close to your heart."

Knox pushed the glowing crystals, one by one, into his chest. If this caused him any pain, he didn't show it; but he wasn't a happy boy, that much was certain. Maybe Angel was right, and the man was seeing his life's work and dream about to flush away. A shame, that.

Another fifty minutes until the sun. They were cutting it close, but there'd be time enough to get back to the car and its necro-tempered windows. They had the sacraments, they were on schedule, and Knox was still in one piece. So, two out of three. It was time to do this, time to hope.

_I believe in fairies,_ Spike thought.


	8. Chapter Eight

The building had been emptied, except for the science corridor, when he arrived. Gunn finished talking to one of the armed men lining the walls and came to meet Wesley. It seemed appropriate for them to shake hands. Wes offered his and was glad Gunn gripped it with no hesitation. The two of them walked together.

"How you holding up?" the attorney said. "You ready for this?"

Taking in the length of the corridor, Wesley thought about that. In fact, he felt utterly despondent. "I'm ready. Is the area secure?"

"Locked tight." Gunn's eyes shifted over the assembled figures. "Wasn't too hard to pull some of the old crew in. Most of your people came, too. They wanted paying upfront."

In addition to the young black men, there were some others, distinct not so much by the whiteness of their faces as by the lack of emotion on them. Wesley recognised these from the dark days when he'd been estranged from his friends. They were little more than mercenaries, but they were handy in a fight, and trustworthy.

"I'm not at all surprised," he said. "I'll check on preparations in the lab."

"Okay. Don't start without me." A Gunn's look hinted at something else.

"What is it?"

Gunn made a quick sound, as if he was trying to laugh something off. Perhaps it was necessary to maintain an image for his old comrades. He led Wes to one side as they reached the lab and spoke quietly. "Are you feeling it?"

Indeed he was. It had been growing in him for hours. "The sense of despair, you mean? I'm not allowing it to control me. Not this time."

Seeming diminished, Gunn held his gaze, and for the first time Wesley really saw the guilt he carried, saw how much he still blamed himself for what had happened last winter. He'd never looked so vulnerable. "Make this work, Wes."

It was impossible to know how to respond to that, and so Wesley answered by standing there with his friend a moment longer. He nodded briskly, an acknowledgment rather than an affirmation, and entered the lab.

A stone sarcophagus occupied the centre of the room, surrounded by four massive coils like hooked fingers. Lorne fussed around these with several technicians while Angel reattached the red crystal that Wes had broken from the sarcophagus months before. Spike stood back with his arms folded, as if supervising.

These things only occupied the peripheries of Wesley's awareness, however. What really drew his attention was Knox moving about the room with Illyria following closely behind. He was pulling crystals from his chest cavity like a ghastly stage illusionist. Wes watched the bastard set one into each of the first two coils. At the third, Illyria clamped a hand around his upper arm.

"Place them correctly, Qwa'ha Xahn," she said.

Knox beamed from ear to ear. "Well, I _could_ do that, but-" He yelped as Illyria calmly lifted him off the floor. Angel, Spike, and Lorne all turned to look.

"Do you wish to be introduced to horrors?" Her tone was impassive, as if this were a genuine question. "Perhaps you will find it interesting to shriek through the ages that pass while the denizens of hell attempt to reassemble you." As she studied him, her head slowly tipped from side to side. She looked honestly curious.

With some reluctance, Wes crossed the lab to them. Though appealing, her idea wouldn't help anyone. When he reached her, he spoke quietly, trying to make her hear that he understood. "That's enough."

The words momentarily froze her in place. Illyria stared at the sarcophagus, and then lowered Knox softly back to the ground. She made a magisterial gesture to the nearest coil. "Obey." Knox did, finishing with the coils and placing another red crystal on the sarcophagus itself. Using a hand scanner attuned to frequencies of mystical energy, Wes noted its position.

"Wes!" Lorne stepped forward, obviously trying to lighten the mood. "Are these the things you wanted? I've been keeping an eye on the lab guys, but, you know, secret mystical technology isn't my forte."

Wesley circled the coils, checking them over. "These are rather complex, it's true."

The demon attempted a smile. "You should see a standard Entertainments Division contract."

One side of his mouth curling in a weak but grateful response, Wes inspected the laser guides and interlinked electronic micrometers around the coils, ensuring distances and positions were correct. The ratios of the coil's relative locations were critical. He released a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding. Everything was as it should be. "Excellent work," he said to Lorne. Then he addressed the technicians. "You won't be required again today, thank you."

Following them out of the lab, Wesley beckoned to a man from his old team. "Jones, please escort these ladies and gentlemen to another part of the building. The outside of it would be good." It was a little rude, but he couldn't take any chances for the sake of good manners. He continued to follow them until he was within talking distance of Gunn. "We're ready now," he said.

- - -

"And Lorne, if you could stand here."

Angel, Spike, Gunn, and Lorne now surrounded the sarcophagus, each one of them standing under a coil.

Seeing uncertainty and failure in their eyes, Wesley began to doubt they were up to this. He tried to ignore the feeling. "A degree of concentration is needed. It's important that you allow your minds to act as conduits for the calculation."

Angel's expression became more alarmed. "We have to do math?"

Lorne groaned.

Wes raised a hand. "No. I'll be responsible for that. You four are simply part of the energy focus system."

"Oh, stop it." Spike said. "I'm blushing."

Gunn gave the vampire a look before making a questioning gesture to Wes. "What about you? Where do you go?"

"Higher spatial geometry comes into play here." Wesley indicated the coils. "Imagine each of these is a corner. Together, the four make up one plane of a shape. I must be fourteen point seven feet higher, at the apex. Coincidentally, that is in my office, directly above this room."

Their eyes moved over the coils and then pointed upward. Angel frowned and looked straight at him, verging on embarrassed. "A pyramid? Isn't that a bit, well, corny?"

"And Seventies?" Gunn said.

Even in his dark mood, Wes felt a trace of amusement and welcomed it as a small victory. He was lucky to know these people. They'd do fine. "It's actually the extension into three dimensions of a hyper-polygonic-"

They all stared at him.

"It's a pyramid," he finished.

The amusement remained a little while. After a period of silence, Wesley made a move to the door. "Right, then. Once Illyria is in position the procedure can begin. I thought of several things to say at this moment, but they all seem redundant now." He gave them a final look, and knew he could rely on them.

- - -

Together with Illyria and Knox, Wes marched along the science corridor to the stairs. Two of the new guards, Rondell and Brownstreet, fell in wordlessly behind them. Wesley's emotions were telling him to find a corner somewhere to crawl into, but he paid them no heed. He was making the decisions.

They hadn't got very far when Spike caught them up. "Can you give me a second?" Without waiting for an answer he pulled Wes back so that they lagged behind the others. "I didn't want to say anything in there, but Fred told me she had other ways for ghosts to get their bodies back. Dangerous, she said."

Wes shrugged with one shoulder. "What I'm about to try does have an element of risk, yes."

"Risk for…?"

"Me. Were I to become lost in the calculation, I might be unable to return from it." He spoke in a voice that sounded as careless as he felt on the subject. Any danger to him was reasonable.

Seeming to appreciate this, Spike nodded. "Well, best of British and all that. You bring her back, now."

"Thank you," Wesley said, truly grateful to the vampire. Spike turned back to the lab, and Wes continued along the corridor to the stairs, feeling more positive. When he arrived at his office, Rondell and Brownstreet flanked the doorway.

"She'll come through," Rondell said. "She's a fighter." Wesley inclined his head.

In the office, Wes drew a small cross on the carpet and waited while Knox placed the final crystal. It was a vivid yellow colour, almost an amber. The scanner showed Wesley that its location was within the acceptable margin of error, and he took out his phone to call the lab. Angel would be waiting to sign Knox's release papers. Before he could make the call, Knox himself approached, his eyes laughing. "I want you to know – and I want you to tell Angel – that I'll be making a formal complaint." Even now he looked cheerful and smug; it bordered on the psychotic. Illyria, who had been gazing at the crystal, glanced up and casually slapped him across the face. There were two muffled crunches as his head span almost two hundred and seventy degrees. He dropped to the floor.

Nothing needed to be said. After Wes called Angel to let him know they were finished with Knox, a portal opened and the man was taken back to wherever he'd come from.

So. The sacraments were in position. Illyria merely had to take her place in the lab, and all would be ready. This was the time to say goodbye. The Old One deserved a kind farewell. "Illyria," Wesley began, "I wanted to thank you."

Those unearthly eyes lowered. She seemed simultaneously detached and troubled. "Now I truly understand nightmare," she said. "I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." Graceful disappointment took away some of her posture. "I once ruled this world and many others. I was to have ruled again." Her words were almost a sigh. "The shell is with me always now. Her thoughts and feelings are mine. I cannot be wise when her soul whispers. I fear she has bested me." The little animation that had been in her face faded into blankness and her head tilted. "She speaks. I know the words but I do not understand them."

"What are they?" Wesley hadn't spoken for several seconds. His breath had caught.

"_Amare et sapere vix deo conceditur_." She was quoting from the Roman farce writer Publilius Syrus – even a god can scarcely love and be wise at the same time. Returning to an alert stance, Illyria faced him. "I grow impatient for the Well, for the embrace of its sleep until my and my brethren's return."

Wes smiled a little. "I'm afraid I won't be here for that."

She stared back. "You have not seen me in my grace and majesty, Wesley. Pray you never do." Moving to the windows, she cast her gaze over Los Angeles in much the same way Angel did. There was a hint of protectiveness in her look. "The latter days when the Old Ones reawaken will be a time of great chaos and pain."

The moment felt crucial. Joining her, Wes let his own eyes roam across the buildings and the confused, clumsy humanity. "Then remember what you have learnt here."

Her smile was slight and not a bit like any of Fred's smiles. "I will try."

He touched a cautious hand to her shoulder. "Rest well, Illyria."

"Be happy with her," she said.

- - -

It seemed strange to Angel, but now that Illyria was leaving the world she looked more comfortable than she ever had. Saying nothing, she walked across the lab and lay on the sarcophagus. Angel blinked when he saw her cross her arms over her chest.

Her eyes flicked in his direction. "It seemed apt." Was she joking with him?

Spike coughed. "See you around, then, Blue."

Those eyes moved toward him. "It is unlikely you will exist for long enough. You should develop your fighting skills. You telegraph most of your blows."

"Oh, do I?" Apparently finding it easy to accept that she was teasing him, Spike took on an expression of mock offence. "You hit like a girl." He smirked.

"Farewell, Spike." There was some sadness in her voice. The eyes shifted to Gunn. "You are unnecessarily troubled, Charles Gunn."

He smiled feebly. "Not sure it's unnecessary, but thanks. Take it easy."

As she looked at him, the faintest glimmer of compassion formed in the depths of her icy stare. Then she turned to Lorne. "Krevlorneswath, our song was agreeable."

Although he was often surprisingly guarded, the demon smiled warmly. "If you ever want a gig, blueberry muffin, you know who to call."

Some of the warmth reflected back from her, but when her glance fell on Angel it had gone. In its place there was something else. Respect? "I entrust this kingdom to you, Angel."

Instead of responding to that with something sardonic, Angel bowed slightly. It occurred to him that she was essentially saying goodbye to what she thought of as her court, but humouring her was the right and kind thing to do. Besides, he couldn't help but feel secretly flattered.

Her gaze finally came to rest pointing straight at the ceiling. "It is time. Begin."

Angel closed his eyes. Almost immediately he felt a jolt as something began to pass through him, tying him to the rest of the Black Thorn. It was like an electric shock, but not physical. Even while his body slumped and relaxed, so that it began to seem far from him, his awareness was stretched and prickling. It was as if his soul had been plugged into the LA power grid. In a panicked trance, he inwardly gritted his teeth and held on, wondering what this must be like for Wesley.

- - -

Wesley knew the trees, of course. It had only been three years since he was last in Pylea. He made his way through their tangles, following the singing as if it were a gentle stream on the forest floor. This was no dream or hallucination; this was solid and unchanging. Yet it wasn't real, either. The air, light, and world around were quite literally perfect. He was living the calculation.

She stood in a clearing, surrounded by four tall trees. Greasy hair hung in strands over her dirty face and burlap rags. She was beautiful; his dear one. Captivated by the sight, Wes moved between foliage that now seemed almost ethereal and stopped a few feet away from her. In truth, he didn't dare approach too closely in case that would somehow break this spell. And so he watched her – an old habit. She went to each of the trees in turn, humming snatches of song and peering into the branches. Then she saw him and broke into a grin. "Hi!"

Shadows were banished. "Hello, Fred."

The grin widened and she immediately took his hand, leading him across the clearing. Her tone was bright and familiar. "I used to come to this place sometimes, 'cause it's miles from anywhere and I could be safe for a while. Although it being miles from anywhere meant there was no real food… But there were nuts." Her hand was alive, soft, and radiated heat. Her grip was firm.

"Nuts aren't real food?" He'd missed her so much.

She stopped and turned to him with a little smile and comically guilty eyes. "I tried to think they were nuts when I ate 'em. Bugs love these trees." A laugh escaped her and they began to walk again. "I became an amateur entomologist for a while. And an etymologist. Naming things was a good way to keep my mind occupied." They'd reached one of the trees now, and Wesley could see a number of pupae among its leaves. Fred placed a hand on his arm. "Don't worry. No nuts today. We're just here to see the butterflies."

One had almost broken free of its chrysalis. It slid out and its wings began to unfold with tiny pulses, spreading and drying quickly. They were spectacular. After what seemed no time at all, the wings flickered and the insect flew away, perhaps to cause a hurricane or two.

"Such a sweet thing!" Fred said. She nodded, smiling, obviously a little pleased with herself. "I called it _Miluus Paelius vastitatis_."

"Pylean kite of desolation?"

"I was feeling kinda down." Gazing at him fondly, she touched his neck with one hand while picking a leaf with the other. It twirled back and forth in her fingers before she handed it over. "The Mandelbrot fractal set."

Wesley examined the leaf.

She leaned close, conspiratorial. "Careful. Curiosity killed the cat."

Lifting his head, Wes allowed his gaze to linger on her face. Fred looked and smelt like someone who'd been living in cave for years, but he barely noticed, fixed as he was by her eyes and the soul within them. He was about to embrace her when he heard distant voices and the sounds of branches tearing. "Palace guards," he murmured.

Her big eyes became huge eyes, even while a worried frown narrowed her face. "There are no palace guards in this version of Pylea. Wesley, it's _them_."

Wes reached into his jacket and found no holster and no gun. He raised an eyebrow. "I'd have loved a gun, Fred."

A corner of her mouth quirking apologetically, she shrugged. Then her head turned as the sounds began again, somewhat closer. "We have to leave." She took his hand once more and led him out of the clearing. What seemed like miles of forest and then open country passed by them in minutes.

They came to a cliff and started clambering along a narrow path. "Watch your step here," she said. "You don't wanna wind up in the drokken gully." After only a few more yards the entrance to a cave came into view and she ran inside. Wesley followed, reading parts of the writing-covered walls. Equations flowed incongruously over the coarse stone. Who would win in a fight between astronauts and cavemen? Here was the lateral answer. They all win, because they stop fighting and start cooperating.

"Fred?" he called, surprised that her cave was this size. It went far into the cliff and, oddly, the luminosity slowly grew as Wes moved deeper inside. He wasn't certain when the floor changed, or when light fittings and furniture began to emerge from the gloom, but he abruptly realised he was in the lobby of the Hyperion. Fred was also there, wearing a summer dress and denim jacket, her hair in bunches. There was no pentagram on the floor. This was the dream, the one in which he always made her leave. She stood near the reception desk, facing his old office.

_Not this time_, he thought and went to the other side of the desk to stand opposite her. "The hotel?" He asked the question gently. "Why are we here, Fred?"

Placing an elbow on the desk, she rested her chin on her palm. "Define supersymmetry for me."

Wesley had to stop and think. As usual, she'd surprised him. Her other hand lay on the desktop, and Wes slid his palm over the varnished wood until his fingertips touched hers. "Supersymmetry is the hypothesis that every particle in nature has an as-yet-undiscovered perfect partner."

Her fingers crept over his, thumb stroking the back of his hand. "I guess by this stage we can lose the 'as-yet-undiscovered' part." Fred glanced around the lobby. "This is where and when you made me feel connected and a part of the world." A heart-stopping smile appeared on her face as she looked at him again. "I felt so wanted."

He returned the smile. It was impossible not to. "You are, always."

"And the great thing is I know it."

With his free hand, Wes brushed a stray lock of hair from her cheek. They stayed like that for a while.

"So what happens now?" he said at last.

A suggestion of unease crept onto Fred's happy face. "In a second I'm gonna ask to stay."

- - -

Angel's eyes slammed open and he looked at the still-motionless Illyria. There was no visible change, but that seemed almost irrelevant. It wasn't necessary for him to ask Spike why he had also just snapped out of the trance. The two vampires stared at one another. Fred's scent was in the air.

"Whoa." Gunn stood straight, blinking. Lorne began to stir. The Circle was broken.

Illyria moaned a little. Without a second's thought, Angel darted to the sarcophagus and took one of her hands, while Spike moved to grasp the other. Lorne and Gunn joined them. The demon squatted so that he was on a level with her, his head close to hers. "Fred, honey, is that you?"

"Hey, Fred." Gunn's light-heartedness sounded desperate to Angel.

Leaning forward, Spike held her hand between both of his. His expression was intense, but his voice was soft. "Come on, love. Come back to us."

It was all any of them could do. Angel glanced up at the ceiling. Wes was on his own, now.

- - -

There were only a few dry chuckles at first, but it didn't take long before Father was laughing like a drain in Wesley's mind. The hateful sound was so shrewd, so antithetical to humour. Wes began to shiver and reached out to Fred. "Don't go."

She shook her head, pulling away. "I belong here. Un-unless I don't. Which if-if you don't wanna put up with me, I completely understand..."

Suddenly he found himself on the other side of the desk, gripping her arms. He inevitably walked her toward the doors. Their relationship had always been doomed, always been based on doom. Father's laughter went on and on. They reached the steps, and the doors opened on the void beyond. Wesley knew he'd step into it with her.

"Please, Wesley, why can't I stay?" There was trust in Fred's eyes. Wes looked with dread at what lay outside the hotel.

The void… it was them. They were actually elements of a whole, an immense and ruthless mechanism driving all before it into darkness. It drained the light from him, making hope into nothing but pain. And Father was a part of it, an inner expression of an outer evil. Wesley looked at the laughing man inside and saw himself as well as his father looking back. It was to these as much as Fred that he spoke. "Let's put it to a vote, shall we?" _We can do this_, he thought. _We can make the decision_.

Father laughed harder than ever, but the inner Wesley faltered a little. While that wasn't much, it was an opening. Wes appealed to himself. "All in favour say aye."

Inner Wesley glanced at Father for a long moment, then smiled, lopsided. It became apparent that his face was laterally inverted – a mirror image. "Aye," he mouthed, raising a hand as Wes spoke the word. Father fell silent, and something that had been crushing Wesley's soul, lifted. Folding his arms around Fred, he turned away from the doors, sheltering her from the nothingness beyond. Chivalry was appropriate on this occasion. "Motion passed. Good. You're staying."

Moving her hands to his neck and shoulder, she brought her face close, no sign in her expression that there had been a chance of failure. "Satisfaction brought her back." She favoured him with another brilliant smile and pressed her lips to his.

- - -

Blue to brown. Seeing Illyria's eyes change colour before they squeezed shut was like watching a brutal force of nature at work. This power took hold of Angel, too, throwing him away from the sarcophagus, his skull impacting against one of the coils. He landed beside Gunn, dimly understanding that all of them had been knocked to the floor. It took a few seconds for his head to clear. By the time he stood she was getting to her feet.

There was still a greyish tinge to the naked woman's skin, but this quickly faded, passing along her body and leaving it through a hand that she had pressed against the sarcophagus. When it was over, she opened her eyes, seeming lost.

Lorne was the nearest, taking off his jacket to cover her. It looked faintly ridiculous – the shoulders were more than twice as wide as hers. As he fastened the buttons, she gazed uncertainly into his eyes.

"Hi, Lorne." Her voice was tiny.

The demon answered in kind. "Hi." His own voice was unusually devoid of irony. "Fred, could you…"

"Sure." She began to sing. "Ro-"

That was as far as she got before Lorne threw his arms around her and kept them there. He eventually turned to the others. "It's her. It's just her."

Her eyes became more focused and she looked at them all, a grin starting to appear. "I knew you'd come through for me, boys." Angel just stared in joyful disbelief.

His smile a little hesitant, Gunn approached her. "Look, Fred, I-"

"Don't be silly," she said, reassuring, hugging him before she turned to Spike.

The other vampire put his hands up in surrender. "Remind me to stay out of your bad books, love."

She rolled her eyes. "Spike."

He laughed. Then, sobering a little, he held her. "Really thought we'd lost you, you know."

Angel relived all his memories of her when she faced him. A couple of seconds passed while they smiled at each other; then she squeezed him affectionately. "Saved again."

_Yes_, Angel thought, _I have been_. "Are you feeling okay?"

"I'm feeling like someone who hasn't eaten for five months." She laughed, small but genuine. "I'm fine, considering. I-" She looked quickly to the side. Following her gaze, Angel saw that Wes stood in the doorway. The man's face was close to vacant and he swayed a little. He managed to take a step into the room before he fell to his knees and then his haunches. Angel was about to go to him when Fred ran across the lab. She knelt and embraced Wesley, resting his head on her shoulder and holding him upright. "It's okay. Everything's okay."

Wes began to shake. Placing her mouth to his ear, Fred sang, so quietly than Angel could barely hear it. He couldn't even tell if there were words or just a melody. Turning to the others, he noticed that Spike was also straining to make it out. The empath, however, appeared to see something. Angel walked around the sarcophagus to stand by him. "Lorne?"

"She'll be okay." Lorne sounded certain.

There was calm amazement in Gunn's voice. "After what happened to her?"

Angel watched Spike smile at the man and woman on the floor, and for a moment he didn't look like Spike. He looked like William, the strange innocent Drucilla had brought home one night like a cat with a mouse. "We should leave them to it. Anyway, I need to find a pen."

Giving them time alone sounded good, but Fred and Wes probably didn't even notice anyone else was in the room. His shaking had stopped and she now just held onto him. Something else had changed in the last few minutes. Angel felt blissfully cut loose. "Come on," he said to the others. "We won today. Let's celebrate."

- - -

Fred. He rubbed his face against her skin.

Lorne's jacket kept slipping from her shoulder, and she eventually pulled the garment off altogether. She pressed Wesley against her chest, kissing and stroking his head. The heat of her body, the touch and smell of her, the rhythms of her heart and breath, gradually soothed him. After a time she drew back, fingertips trailing over his brow. "You see? I told you we'd be together."

"That was you?" But hadn't he known?

She smiled at him. "Mostly."

It was a smile a man could bask in, and Wesley was doing that when a sense of reality began to return. Whatever had just happened was vague in his memory, but he knew they'd succeeded. Fred had succeeded. Was he actually allowing himself to be comforted when it was she who had been through an unimaginably hellish experience? Wes summoned the shreds of strength left to him in an attempt to at least get to his knees, but found he was literally unable to do so. He settled for putting his hands around her waist. "Were we just in the hotel?"

"I think so," she said. "It's all a bit fuzzy."

"Yes." His eyes traced her features. "How much do you remember about the last few months?"

"All of it."

There was pain on her face, and Wes felt disgusted with his own insensitivity. "I'm sorry. This isn't the time."

"Will there be one?" Somehow she brought her smile a little of the way back. "I remember it was pretty bad at first, then it got to be kinda like being back in the cave, which wasn't good either, but there was a window and I could see all my friends. I could see you." The smile faded and her eyes began to moisten. "I tried to let you know I was okay. I tried so hard."

It was enough. Wes attempted to raise himself onto his knees again, and again he discovered it was impossible. He did it anyway, and mirrored Fred's and his earlier arrangement; only this time it was her head against his chest. His fingers moved in a small circle on her scalp. "You were amazing, just like always." Sliding his hand under her chin so that he could carefully raise her face toward his, Wesley managed a soft laugh. "You know I'm not good at picking up signals."

This made her laugh a little, too. They kissed; time passed.

She stood, pulling him with her, and it wasn't impossible to stand, not when she was there. Fred took a lab coat from the wall, slipping it on before linking an arm through his. He kissed the top of her head. "You should really let Medical have a look at you."

A corner of her mouth pulled inward. "Because they did such a great job the last time."

They at looked at each other and embraced needfully. Wes toyed with her hair. "Would you come to Medical with me, please?"

She looked up at him, and the put-upon expression she wore was wonderful. "Okay, but I'm not letting them keep hold of me for long. We're getting food, then we're going home, and we're going to bed." Something about his face made her grin. "To sleep."

"Of course. You must be exhausted." As was he, though he couldn't imagine being able to sleep at the moment.

She leaned against him so that her jaw was flat against his chest. "We have to build up our strength up for tonight."

"Tonight?"

Her voice was a happy caress. "Uh huh. You're taking me out. It's going to be a surprise."


	9. Chapter Nine

Although Fred and Wes had only been into work a handful of occasions over the last few months, those, and the times Angel had met them socially, revealed a healing process at work. To begin with, one or both of them had looked drawn, as if sleep was hard to find, but as the weeks passed they became settled. He'd had to wait until they were ready; now he couldn't stall any longer. It would be done today.

The source book lay closed on Angel's desk, as it had for the past ten minutes. He worked on a letter, involuntarily stealing glances at the red volume.

"Hey." Gunn entered the office, briefcase in hand. "We all set?"

"Just finishing up a few things." Angel covered what he'd been writing with some papers. "You haven't brought more work, have you? Please tell me you aren't the bringer of work."

In one movement, Gunn sat and opened the case. It looked like the performance of a slick lawyer. Was this that self-confidence he'd been showing lately, or was it something Wolfram & Hart had programmed into him? That was the kind of question they'd all ask themselves from now on.

And yet. Every time Angel awoke he felt a weird mixture of elation and panic. It had taken weeks for him to realise that this was because the future had a big question mark hanging over it. He'd thought last May he understood what the world was and what his place in it meant (or didn't mean). Now he was both blessed and cursed with options.

"There's this one thing." The attorney produced a document from his case. "That matter you wanted looked into?"

Part of the future came back to Angel. He stared at the parchment on his desk – the Shanshu Prophecy, made worthless by his signature. "The Shanshu." His eyes met Gunn's. "Is there a way?"

"There is."

Angel steeled himself. It was probably something with tests and guardians, and possibly catacombs. Actually, catacombs seemed likely.

Taking out a pen, Gunn drew a neat line through the signature. Angel could sense a familiar smell. "You have a pen already filled with blood?"

"Had that set up my first week here. I got a blood stash in my office. Saves me having to jab myself every time I sign something." He wrote, "Witnessed by Charles Gunn, Attorney at Law" and his own signature before pushing the Prophecy over to Angel. "Initial here to confirm the alteration, please," he said in a formal voice. In his normal tones, he added, "Why, what do you do?"

Angel took out his own blood pen and, glowering at Gunn, stabbed himself in the hand before writing the letter "a" onto the Shanshu. "Thanks for sharing. What happens next?"

Gunn raised his palms. "That's it."

"That's it?"

"You're now fully Shanshu-covered."

Go easy, come easy. Redemptions or rewards weren't needed, but that didn't mean they weren't welcome. Sometimes it was even possible to arrange one for a friend. Angel felt a small, unguarded smile on his face, the hope that he would one day return to humanity. "I thought it would be more… involved."

"It was." Gunn's glance held something understanding as he got to his feet. "Anyway, is everyone meeting in the motor pool?"

"Give me ten minutes or so." Angel carefully rolled up the Prophecy and put it in his safe.

After Gunn left, Angel completed the letter. He read it through a couple of times then almost signed it in blood before he realised he'd picked up the wrong pen. Maybe that wouldn't have been such a terrible mistake. This was a kind of contract, after all.

Spike poked his head through the door. "Time's wasting." His eyes moved over the desk. Fortunately, they didn't rest on the letter that Angel quickly folded and pocketed, but on the source book. "Any more prophecies about me?"

The fact that he'd just been looking at the Shanshu made Angel sit in silence for a beat. "I was reading a dictionary of saints."

Frowning and smirking simultaneously, the other vampire said, "Are you the world's first Catholic vampire now?"

Angel allowed himself a little smile. "It was something you said about soul mates, how they can meet in more than one life, how they can be family."

"Any two close people. What about it?"

A good question, one he felt like talking about, and for some reason Spike seemed like the right person to talk to. "In the old country, people never shut up about saints. There was saint for everything. I didn't think much of the stories about them. But, who knows? Maybe some of them were slayers, magic users, champions."

Looking slightly confused, Spike moved closer to the desk. "Maybe."

"What do you know about Saint Winifred?"

Eyebrows rose then lowered in surprise and puzzlement. "Winifred's was a home for orphans in London. That's all. Are you going to tell me she's the patron saint of ex-Watchers with father issues?"

"Winifred's a patron of virgins."

The expression of glee on Spike's face crumpled before it completely formed. He could probably see this wasn't going to be funny.

"And a patron of abused children," Angel said.

Spike stared at him, unreadable. He dropped into a chair. "What's Wini's story?"

Angel rose and walked to the necro-tempered glass. The sunlit world outside had never felt closer. "She lived in Wales in the seventh century near her uncle, Beuno. He's a saint, too. They were very close." He studied the city's millions of windows. "One day, this guy came onto her. She told him to get lost, but he wasn't taking no for an answer."

"He forced himself on her?" The voice Spike used was surprisingly upset, making Angel glance back before he continued.

"He tried to, but she wouldn't let herself be taken. So he cut her head off."

Spike whisper-whistled, long and cheerless. "Sad little story."

Angel turned around. "The story doesn't end there. Winifred was miraculously restored to life, by Beuno."

"What, Uncle Beuno just stuck her head back on, did he?"

"More or less. He didn't do it alone, though. Some friends prayed with him." Remembering the account he'd just read, Angel became thoughtful. It had said that Winifred carried the scar on her neck for the rest of her life. "There's a shrine to her over there in Britain. Guess what it's called."

Spike shook his head.

"Winifred's Well."

There was a period of quiet. The other vampire laughed uneasily, and Angel shrugged, breaking the moment. "Forget about it; it's just a coincidence. Let's get going."

- - -

Spike wandered through the airport with the rest of them. Quite a hectic place, this. Not a place for strolling. People were hauling carts laden with suitcases and bags. People were rushing by, looking at their watches and not at the other watch-watchers coming toward them. People were barmy, sometimes.

Angel had insisted on carrying the cases, bags, and Fred's jacket. Lorne and Gunn chatted away comfortably with Fred and Wes. Spike felt on the margins. They all made him welcome these days; even the boss was only insufferable half the time. No, the problem was that he had something difficult to do this evening, and small talk and pleasantries grated on him.

They finally got near to customs. While Angel took everything but the jacket and hand luggage to be checked in, Lorne stood forward, showy. "We have presents."

"Presents?" Wesley looked embarrassed. "Really, there was no need-" He broke off and smiled as Fred let out a whoop.

"We're only goin' for ten days." She whooped again.

"I know that, Fredkins, but the gift I've got you for you? It's just too good to pass up." Lorne passed her a kitsch-yet-tastefully wrapped package. Most likely he'd paid someone a fortune to parcel it up like that. Fred tore it open in about half a second; the demon's smile became a bit fixed-looking.

Inside the paper was a wooden box, and she got that open in record time, too, pulling out a black sphere about two and a half inches across. "A magic eight ball," she said, and now her smile was the one that seemed stuck-on. Then that spark inside her crackled. "Is this one really magic?"

Moving to her side, Lorne laid an arm over her shoulders. "Not exactly. Let me show you how this works, my little taco belle." He took the ball from her and started to shake it gently. "Ask a question about the future."

"Will I win a Nobel prize?"

Lorne upturned the eight ball, and Spike leaned over to see what the answer would be. The little window on the toy stared up at him. After a moment, the words "HOW THE HELL SHOULD I KNOW?" floated to the surface.

Spike's eyes swivelled derisively upward. The crowd laugh politely and it's into another song – he should be onstage, that green bloke. Fred seemed over the Moon, though.

Gunn produced two conservatively-wrapped boxes, which turned out to contain a pair of antique reading lamps, small and neat. Again, the gifts were eagerly accepted, but Spike was too anxious to pay much attention to the smiles and kind words. It was his turn next.

Alright, be a brave boy and get it over with. They'll never know – how could they even begin to guess? He sauntered over to Wes and handed him a slim volume. "A bit of light reading. If either of you get the time." Hell, this was hard. "Sorry it isn't wrapped or anything; I've only just picked it up."

Surprised, looking the title over, Wesley read aloud, "A Ballad." He skimmed immediately to the publication information. "The poet is unnamed, but this was published by the Left-Hand Press. That's familiar."

Lorne piped up, "They're a subsidiary of Wolfram & Hart."

Spike bored his gaze into the demon's. Lorne's own eyes widened. "Sorry," he mouthed.

No one seemed to notice this exchange, but Spike was worried. He saw Wes thumbing curiously through _A Ballad_ while Fred leaned around him to look, her eyes like an owl's: warm and wise, but also hinting at the single-mindedness of a predator. Those two brainiacs could work almost anything out, given the time, and Spike didn't want them to know. At least, he thought he didn't.

"This is good," Wes said. "Thank you."

Well. There you are then. Feeling absurdly pleased and awkward, Spike tried to think of a response. He was still doing this when Angel, moving in that slightly guilty way of his, returned. "Gifts, huh?"

"Yep." Fred raised her eyes from the poem to look at him expectantly.

Smiling back, Angel held out empty hands. The human's wouldn't notice, but there was a hesitation there, though the face held no reason for it.

"I don't have it on me now," Angel said. "You'll get it when you're there."

Strange, since it had been his idea to have going-away presents in the first place. Spike analysed Angel's body language. Was it just him, or did the other vampire seem more guilty than usual?

Goodbyes were said; hugs and handshakes were exchanged. That was that, and they were on their way. It was a good thing Fred and Wes were getting a little time out of LA. Seeing them go, in high spirits, was almost enough to make a jaded old vamp cheerful. So why didn't Angel look at all glad? The muscles around his eyes hardly twitched, but that was enough for Spike to see a touch of melancholy that shouldn't have been there.

- - -

This was a day for gifts, it seemed. It hadn't been easy to find the pendent, impossible, in fact. He'd finally had to see a master jeweller to have it crafted – a tiny butterfly, made from spun filaments of white gold. Fred gazed out of the limousine's open window and Wesley fastened the clasp for her, touching her neck with the backs of his fingers far more than was necessary.

At first, things had been difficult for both of them, mostly because of the nightmares. Sometimes he'd wake, almost overwhelmed by panic, certain he would find Illyria with him. On other occasions it was Fred's sleep that became troubled, dreams of pain, fear, and suffocation making her claw at the air. One bad night both of them had woken at roughly the same time, terrified. They'd clung on to one another, weeping with relief and with sorrow at the other's hurt.

After that night, and the day of words and lovemaking that followed it, the bad dreams began to lessen. Already they had become rare and vague for Wes. Fred's nightmares reverted back to her years in Pylea. It distressed him that she sometimes had to re-experience those days, but, as she told him, they were a part of who she was.

Holding up the pendent, her eyes bright, Fred said, "Are you always gonna do these things for me?"

Wesley smiled. "The plan is to spoil you rotten for several decades." The presumptuous implications of what he'd just said began dawn on him; before he felt any discomfort she lifted a hand and stroked his face.

"That's a great plan. Kiss me."

He leaned toward her and she closed her eyes, but a sudden desire for mischief made him continue past her face until he brushed his lips against her ear. "I'd be delighted. Where would you like it?"

She pushed him away, face a picture of suppressed mirth. Her finger pointed to a mouth that struggled not to laugh. The mirth broke free, and he held her, feeling and hearing her life.

"You know how I _really_ like to be spoilt," she said eventually, grinning.

Wesley grinned back. She was the only person he knew who could make him smile like that. "I have an idea, yes."

Fred eyes became brighter. "And what might that be?"

Very slowly, he rubbed the top of her foot. "I thought I'd start by kissing your toes, and then work my way…" After allowing his hand to trail higher over her ankle and her calf muscles, Wes paused to leave a lingering caress behind her knee. He was about to continue this delightful journey when he saw her eyebrows draw together. She looked disappointed and sheepish, and she sighed unhappily.

"The spoiling might have to go on hold for a while."

"It might?"

"Mom's putting us in separate rooms, remember?"

Oh, dear. He'd almost managed to block that from his mind. Wesley glanced out at the moonlit Texan farmland scrolling by. He turned back to Fred.

She stared at him then burst into laughter. "Your face! This is one of those I-wish-I-had-a-camera moments."

There was tentative relief. It was faintly possible she'd been teasing him about the sleeping arrangements. "So it was a joke?" Hope, that was the thing.

"Erm, no."

"Ah."

She gave him her most puppy-dog eyes, although the glint of her laughter remained in them. "Are you mad? You can tell me."

His thumb smoothed tenderly over her eyebrow, cheekbone, and jaw line. He'd discovered this was something she particularly liked, and her expression became searchingly passionate. Wes touched his lips, gossamer light, to her forehead. "I'm furious," he said softly. "You're in a lot of trouble."

Unmistakeable arousal shaped her eyes. "Am I?" One side of her mouth lifted. "That's gonna give me something to think about when I'm lying in bed, in my room, all alone." She smiled sweetly.

Laughing, Wesley twirled a lock of her hair around his finger. "Minx." He took another look out of the window, feeling a twinge of both frustration and ironic humour. "We're here for ten days, Fred."

"I know." A look of mutual commiseration passed between them.

"Perhaps," he began, trying to make his smile as guileless as hers had been, "perhaps we might visit each other." He cleared his throat. "You know, after lights-out."

She did a very good job of looking shocked and jabbed a finger at his chest. "There's gonna be none of that, mister." The finger relaxed and slipped, meandering, into his shirt. "We'll have to go on long walks." Fred sighed again, and then sat up straight. "We'll be there in a few minutes. Would you pass my jacket? It's getting cold."

"I think that comes from driving through the night with the windows open," Wes said with no special emphasis.

Amused eyes narrowing deliciously, she snatched the denim from him and pulled it on. "I just wanted to see the old places by the road. It's not my fault this car has stupid black windows. Black windows! Windows you can't see out of!" She snuggled in beside him and thrust her hands into her pockets. "Oh," she said, tugging out an envelope. "I didn't put that there."

As she turned it over in her hands, Wes saw that it was addressed to both of them. "That's Angel's handwriting."

Frowning slightly, she opened the envelope and took out two sheets of paper. Though he was intrigued, Wesley wouldn't be so ill-mannered as to read over Fred's shoulder. This was a good excuse to watch her face instead. Initially a smile played around her lips, but it abruptly collapsed into anger. "What the hell?"

Worry stabbed through him. "What is it?"

She raised a hand, intent on the letter. As she read, her emotions shifted again, becoming calmer. By the time she finished and handed it to him, she was smiling again.

Wes began to read.

_Dear Fred, Dear Wes,_

_First of all I just want to say how happy I am that everything has come good for you two (don't panic; I'm not too  
happy). You both deserve it. _

_That kind of brings me to the purpose of this note, and you might not like it. Here goes. You've both taken early  
retirement. Full salary and benefits package._

_Please don't think I want to get rid of you – it's not like either of you are replaceable, and I'm hoping you'll still __be  
__a part of the team. This is an honourable discharge, with full honours for valour. You've done enough. For you, the  
fight is over, at least on the front line. Consider this your going-away present. _

_I want to revive Angel Investigations so we have somewhere independent of this place. I bought the lease for the__  
Hyperion as soon as we started at Wolfram & Hart, though you might prefer somewhere nicer. I see you both leading  
from the back. I don't want either of you in the field again. Maybe you think that's paternalistic, but sometimes it's  
hard not to be when you're over two hundred years older than someone._

_If you don't like that idea, my contacts have told me the new Watchers' Council is opening an academy in California.  
I bet they'd snap you both up for the teaching staff. Of course, you might just decide to spend your time catching up on  
your reading. It's up to you, and that's the point._

_I hope we'll meet often. We all need excuses to get out more, let's be honest. And I'm sure I'll need your help. The six  
of us are bound together, anyway. _

_I was thinking of a name for the team. What about Circle of the White Thorn? I'm just kidding. I wouldn't be that  
cheeseball._

Wesley stopped reading at that point, trying to assimilate it all. While there was some sense of grief and anger, there was considerably more freedom and release. After all that had happened, this felt right. He reread the last paragraph and thought that it wasn't a bad name. Gunn would love it. "The wood of the whitethorn was traditionally used to stake vampires," Wes said, not fully realising he'd spoken aloud until he felt Fred kiss his cheek. He glanced over to see her smiling affectionately.

"I love you." She kissed him again. "Read the rest." When he didn't move, she giggled and physically turned his head back to the letter.

_A world of unhappiness, of perpetual and hopeless conflict, is a world where the Senior Partners have already won.  
If that's all there is, then what are we fighting for? While there's some happiness, the bad guys lose. _

_I think the tide has turned._

_Your friend,_

_angel._

Fred looked into Wesley's eyes. They sat, talking without speaking, until the limousine pulled to a stop. Outside, Wes could see a beautiful house with lights burning, like an oasis in the night. Fred shifted over to the limousine's window, bouncing in her seat. He half expected her to jump out of the car and run to the house, but instead she turned, sliding back across to him. She was sharing her joy at coming home, welcoming him into it.

He held her hands. How could someone so complex be so uncomplicated? "_Nunc et semper ego te amo, anima mea_." I love you now and always, my anima. This last word couldn't properly be translated into English. The feminine form of animus, anima was wind, breath, life, soul, mind, and spirit. To Carl Jung it was the part of a man's unconscious that represents his ideal woman.

"Wes…" Her fingers curled around his. "Wes…" She nestled against him in an embrace that tightened until he could feel her smile press against his shoulder, feel her breath as she whispered. "_Weslius carus meus in aeternum_._ Sol unus meus es_." Forever my beloved Wesley. You are my only sunshine.

The future was a mystery; what their lives might bring was uncertain. But Wesley knew that, when those lives were over, there would be no final partings, no incompleteness, gaps, or holes. For Fred and him, there really would be an ever after.

- - -

"You did _what_?" Spike had jumped to his feet, pushing his chair over onto the lush carpet of Angel's office.

Before Angel could answer him, Lorne murmured, "He fired Fred and Wes." The demon was openly stunned and looked like he would be unable to leave his seat even if he'd wanted to.

"I haven't fired them."

"No?" Now Gunn stood, flanking Lorne with Spike. "That's good, 'cause I got quite the case of déjà vu."

"Amen to that." Lorne looked pensively to one side as he spoke.

Angel had intended to tell them about it carefully, but Spike smelled something was up and had gotten the truth out of him. So now, on the fly, Angel did his best to explain his reasons. He told them Fred and Wes had earned this. He said that sometimes people won their corner of the fight, that sometimes winning and fighting were the same thing. Spike's, Gunn's, and Lorne's faces changed as he talked. The anger, at least, passed.

"I thought the fight was never over for anyone." Gunn's brow lowered. "I don't get it, Angel."

Seemingly lost in thought, Spike turned a quarter circle on his boot heel, staring into the distance. His voice, when he spoke, was an answer to Gunn, and almost the sound of someone saying the obvious. "Sometimes there has to be a happy ending."

Nodding, Angel got up himself. "Let's see how many more of those we can manage." They were pondering this as he left them and made his way to the stairwell, distractedly answering greetings from the night staff. Climbing steps, he contemplated the state of things. The apocalypse still reigned, and evil acts were commonplace. You didn't have to look far to see claws of hopelessness reaching out to pull everything down. At the top of the stairs, he opened a service door and walked out onto the roof, watching Los Angeles as it shined in the night. Who could say what miserable stories were playing out behind those countless lights? One light at a time, that would change.

It started to rain gently, and Angel smiled, thinking of growth and new life. He couldn't say it made him feel glad to be alive. Not yet. He was working on that.


End file.
